


(won’t you let me) walk you home from school

by somethingdifferent



Series: (won't you let me) walk you home from school universe! [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Education, Enemies to Lovers, Everyone Is In Denial, F/M, Happy Ending, Rey is in denial, Slow Burn, a truly unforeseen level of discussion of family babies/kids and divorce, ben is a commitmentphobe, ben solo is in denial, discussion of FAMILY BABIES AND DIVORCE, i have truly no idea where i’m even going with this, if you can call it that in such a mild setting lol, it was a winding road but somehow i ended up with a lot more of it than initially expected lol, not just a river in egypt folks, rey wears danskos and u can’t stop her, reylo kids mentioned in epilogue!!!, title from thirteen by big star naturally, using my copious knowledge of children’s pop culture for good instead of evil, which honestly that should’ve been a tag on this story from the beginning lbr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:23:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 32
Words: 129,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22740151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: “Hi!” The woman the voice belongs to—Rey, he thinks, this must be Rey Jackson, the usurper—walks over to him, wiping hands covered in green paint on a flower-patterned apron splattered with glitter. Ben furrows his brow as he looks at her, taking in her freckles, the dimples he can see even when she's barely smiling, her long limbs, all elbows and knees (coltish, he thinks, before he can stop himself), her hair up off her face in three, yes,threebuns. He is supposed to be angry with her, he's pretty sure, but he can't remember why.“Sorry,” she says, her eyes dimly confused, “are you a parent?”He quickly remembers why.Ben, a counselor in the upper school at the legendary Alliance Academy, keeps finding himself interacting with the lower school art teacher, Rey. He definitely doesn’t like it.[rey/ben; teachers at a fancy-ass private school au]
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: (won't you let me) walk you home from school universe! [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1707403
Comments: 1944
Kudos: 3157





	1. i want my hat back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A new fic! Hooray! I have no idea how long this will be!
> 
> All chapter titles are titles from children’s literature. You’ve been thus warned.

** 1\. i want my hat back **

He hears about it in his building’s faculty lounge almost first thing in the morning, that one of his kids bit the new art teacher.

It happens two weeks into the school year, the weather still sweltering enough that the air conditioning barely does anything to keep the heat at bay. Poe is the one who has the dubious honor of relaying the information. It’s not his fault that he tells Ben before he’s managed to finish his cup of coffee, but Ben is going to blame him anyway.

“One of your third graders—”

“I have one third grader.”

“Whatever.” Poe grins happily, as if he’s so pleased to tell him this. “Your third grader, singular, bit Rey in the arm.”

Ben blinks. “Who the hell is Rey?”

“Rey Jackson," Poe says. At Ben's blank stare, he continues proddingly, “The new art teacher in the lower school?" Again, nothing. “Brown hair? Young? English accent?”

Ben shrugs. “No idea.”

“Jesus, your own mother introduced her at the beginning of the year staff meeting.”

So a _her_ then. Not that he would have thought otherwise, considering her job title. “Why would I go to that?”

“It's mandatory! Wait, never mind—forgot you can get away with fucking anything when you are Benjamin Organa-Solo.”

Ben smirks. “You say that like it's a bad thing.”

“You should go check on her, help her with the paperwork. I don’t think she’s had to do an incident report before.” When Ben only continues to sip his coffee, Poe raises his eyebrows in challenge. “If you don’t go, I’ll tell your mom, and she will be mad at you.”

Ben groans, the sound of defeat.

(Later, in hindsight, Ben will think that it was remarkably simple, how quickly his entire life was fucked. But that is only later.)

Ben did not expect to end up in education. Period.

It was not an easy transition, ending up a counselor in the same school he was expelled from (by his own uncle, that bastard), ending up a counselor for high schoolers at all coming from a background in law, but with the complete and utter annihilation of his reputation at Snoke's firm, he couldn't very well keep practicing in the city. Or anywhere, really—that's the kind of reach Snoke has.

And then, a job offer from his mother, a chance to recoup his losses for a while back home. And the phrase: those who can't do, teach. Or lean on their backup Master's in social work, earned along with a J.D., thank you very much, and go into counseling. Whatever. He’s over it.

Ben likes to think he's not too bad at the job anyway. Sometimes, he even lets himself admit that he likes it.

Before he heads toward the wing of the building that houses the lower school and all its numerous degenerates (bubbly blonde women with doctorates from Peabody, older women with blue-white hair who have been teaching the second grade since 1979, one man who, rumor has it, single-handedly turned around the test scores at his former elementary school and became a local hero to all the kids therein), Ben looks up her resume in the headmistress's office. His mother, a savant of organization, makes it extremely easy for him to find and rifle through the file she has on Rey Jackson.

And it—

It is fucking _thin_.

“Oh,” Ben mutters as he quickly scans the single-spaced page of her previous positions and accomplishments. “Oh, _god_.”

Community college. Bachelor's in art from University of Michigan. GPA of 4.0 (not that impressive, considering the school and her major). Work as a before and aftercare teacher throughout college. And she graduated...yep. Last year.

She must have been born in nineteen-ninety-fucking- _eight_.

“What the fuck?” he hisses.

So another one of his mother's pet projects, then. A lowly little bastard-child for Leia to sculpt into the teacher of her dreams—everything Ben was supposed to be, before he ruined her life by trying to have goals of his own.

Fucking figures.

By the time he manages to put down her file, he is boiling with irritation.

And yes, maybe it's a bit hypocritical, considering that he also cut the line when Leia offered him a position, but— He went to the school. He has two (not one, _two_ ) advanced degrees. He was born before Kurt Cobain killed himself. He can remember landlines and dial-up and life before streaming television online.

Plus, he knows for a fact that Maz Kanata barely made the cut to teach in the upper school, even with her Master's in English literature, even with years of experience under her belt, and this little _nobody_ waltzes in without so much as a how do you fucking do and acts like she has a right to teach at a legendary school like Alliance. And somehow manages to get Kyle, his singular third grader, to regress so completely back into his biting habit in the space of a forty-five minute art class that he has to hear about it from Poe fucking Dameron.

He finds the art room after about twenty minutes of wandering, all the while wondering how no preschoolers have gotten lost in the maze of the building’s many zig-zagging hallways and dead-ends.

When he manages to get there, he wants to kill himself, sort of, the minute he opens the door.

Ben hasn't interacted with a child under the age of eight since he was a child under the age of eight. The only reason for him having Kyle in the first place is because of the kid's uncanny tendency to torment and injure any teacher by running, clawing, punching, spitting, kicking, and, again, as of today, biting his way out of situations he deems less than satisfactory. The lower school counselors—both of them women, both with doctorates, both under five feet tall—were in actual physical danger when put alone into a room with the feral little fucker. So he was pawned off to Ben—tall, male, able to handily wrangle any student set in front of him. He wonders, occasionally, just how much money the kid's parents funnel into the school in order to keep him there. They certainly make enough to keep the kid’s nanny (a woman with platinum blonde hair as tall as Ben who looks like she could benchpress the kid if the need arose) around.

Anyway, Ben actually kind of likes Kyle most of the time, when he's not fully entrenched in a tantrum of rage and defiance. He reminds Ben a little of...himself.

Maybe he's getting sentimental in his old age.

Ben opens the door to the art room, and it is full of four-year-olds.

He barely has time to look around to find the now—in his own head at least—infamous Rey Jackson, when one of them toddles over to him, stares up at him with giant blue bug eyes, and announces, matter-of-fact, “We maded capperillars.”

“Caterpillars,” Ben corrects. This is his life now, apparently. If he manages to find that twenty-two year old, he is going to have a word with her. Or several.

The four-year-old just glares at him. “Capperillars,” she insists.

Ben opens his mouth, about to correct her error again, when he’s interrupted by someone.

The voice that cuts through the shriek of giggling and squealing and the _I had it first_ s and the _you're supposed to share_ s is—

Musical would be the only descriptor for it. Sweet, too; high and clear as a bell. Very British.

“Hi!” The woman it belongs to—Rey, he thinks, this must be Rey Jackson, the usurper—walks over to him, wiping hands covered in green paint on a flower-patterned apron splattered with glitter. Ben furrows his brow as he looks at her, taking in her freckles, the dimples he can see even when she's barely smiling, her long-limbs, all elbows and knees ( _coltish_ , he thinks, before he can stop himself) her hair up off her face in three, yes, _three_ buns. He is supposed to be angry with her, he's pretty sure, but he can't remember why.

“Sorry,” she says, her eyes dimly confused, “are you a parent?”

He quickly remembers why. “No,” he says flatly. “I'm Ben Solo, I work in the upper school.”

She looks at him blankly. He thinks, distantly, that he would like to have this conversation without toddlers knocking into his legs. One of them clings to Rey's hand now, the child's eyes bright and wet, hiding behind his teacher's apron.

“I'm Kyle's counselor,” he clarifies.

He watches recognition dawn on her. “Right.” Without a word, she drops to her knees in front of him. It makes a thrill go up his spine— _how strange_ , he has time to think—but she's not even looking at him, instead whispering something into the ear of the little boy at her side. Whatever she says, it makes the kid's whole face light up in joy. She stands back up, her hand still clutched by the kid, and cracks her neck. She says, her voice tight with obvious annoyance, “I'm with a class now, as you can plainly see, but I have a free period in about two hours. Come back then.”

Any feelings of appreciation for her appearance (she's pretty, so what, he’s a man, he sees things and makes his own observations) instantly dissipate.

“Fine,” he bites out. “I will be back then.”

He stalks out of the room before she can reply in that musical voice of hers, dodging pudgy, glue-sticky hands coming to clutch at his knees on the way.

Fucking preschoolers.

Finding the art room the second time goes a little smoother than the first. But only a little.

In the time between Rey, the coed prodigy, ejecting him from her classroom and Ben returning to talk, or whatever it is he is even planning on doing, he does his level best to boil his issues with her down to three simple points:

1\. If she was having a hard time managing Kyle, she should have called for backup on her walkie the minute his tantrum started.

2\. She should have contacted him immediately to discuss strategies she can implement in her classroom to prevent such a problem happening again. He should not have been required to seek her out himself.

3\. She is too young and attractive and inexperienced to be working at Alliance Academy and he would like for her to admit to such a thing, possibly in writing.

He’s not totally sure what her being attractive has to do with his complaints, but it feels important to include anyway.

Despite the lack of any high-pitched child screams, walking into her classroom a second time is somehow even worse than the first.

Because without the bright shriek of sound and the array of pom poms layering the floor and the dizzying smell of Elmer’s glue filling his nostrils, he is left with nothing but the jarring sight of Rey sitting at one of the student-sized tables, her bare knees peeking out from under a floaty white skirt, the line of her back hunched uncomfortably over the table as she scrawls across the blue paper that can only be the incident report. She is still wearing her apron; it makes him unreasonably pleased.

 _Focus, Solo_.

He vaguely registers that she has some kind of harp music playing from her open laptop as he walks closer. She stays seated, her eyes fixed on the page as she writes, even when he clears his throat.

He stands there a few feet away, waiting, uncharacteristically patient, while she finishes up, finally deigning to raise her head and fix him with her gaze.

Her eyes are hazel, flecks of green spilling into brown like blades of grass. She has dangly strands of curled brown hair loose from her updo framing the sides of her jaw.

He barely registers her saying, “You interrupted my class earlier.”

Ben comes back to reality with a bump. He snorts. “Very important work you were doing, I’m sure.”

Rey narrows those hazel eyes, her eyebrows furrowed together dangerously. “Excuse me?”

“They’re four,” he says mildly. “It’s _art_. Lets call a spade a spade.”

Rey stand up at that, crossing her arms. Without the kids around to distract him, he can see now she’s taller than average (still smaller than him, of course, a lot smaller, he could pick her up so easily—and where the hell did that idea come from?), thin but muscled, her tanned arms flexing as she curls her fingers into the crooks of her elbows. “What makes you think you have the right to come into my classroom and insult my profession?” she asks haltingly.

“Your _profession_?” He chuckles; that’s a bit odd, too, come to think of it. It’s not often he laughs, even just to be mean about it. She bristles at the sound, raising her hackles, those soft cheeks of hers flushing a light pink. It is—unbearably cute.

_Cute?_

Ben shakes his head, clearing it. “You have been in the real world for about three weeks, by my estimate. Don’t get all high and mighty about your vocation just yet.”

“Why are you here?”

For a second, it completely escapes him. Then: “To help with the incident report.”

“I figured it out just fine, thanks.”

Ben deflates slightly. Oh. Then. He should leave. Probably.

He doesn’t leave.

“What happened exactly? Because he hasn’t bitten anyone in about a year and a half, last I checked.”

Rey tilts her chin up, defensive. It shows off the line of her neck, and Ben thinks, hazily, he would like to bite her, too. Sink his teeth in the creamy skin of her throat, and _what the fuck is this thought, Jesus Christ._ “Why are you assuming that it was my fault?”

“I didn’t say it was your fault,” he replies dismissively.

“And yet you still managed to make your meaning perfectly clear.”

“What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t do anything to him, Mr. Solo. If anything, _you_ are the one to blame for what happened.”

Ben blinks. He used to be scary—he’s sure he’s not misremembering that. He’s made more than one trembling housewife cry in court. And yet this— _person_ , this brand new little _no one_ doesn’t seem to be intimidated at all. Has he gone soft? Has all this time living away from the city made him doughy and tender in the center like the gum in the middle of a hard candy? “How the fuck are you drawing that conclusion?”

“Today was Kyle’s first time in my art class. He has never had a chance to be in one with me before, because every single opportunity he’s had thus far has been spent in pull-out sessions with _you_. His teacher forgot you changed the schedule because you only told her _once_ , so she didn’t remind him, he panicked when he saw it wasn’t the same teacher as last year, and he started having a fit as soon as he remembered you weren’t coming to pick him up.” As she speaks, Rey keeps inching closer and closer to him, her head craning back more and more so she doesn’t break eye contact as their height disparity becomes more apparent. And Ben—likes that. Oh, does he like that. “And I did use my walkie as soon as it started, for your information,” she sneers. “He bit me because I had to block him from lunging at another kid for taking his red scissors.”

“Maybe if you were a stronger teacher and ran a tighter ship,” Ben scoffs, “he wouldn’t have been put in a situation where he felt the need to defend his things.”

“Maybe if you weren’t an inconsiderate asshole, you would have realized that changing the schedule of a student without warning all of his teachers was a bad fucking idea.”

“Or you just have no experience and no idea how to manage a classroom.”

“I have managed groups of thirty-five fucking five-year-olds for up to six hours at a time after they’d already been at school since 6 a.m. in places a lot tougher than this, with far fewer materials to work with. After going to class all day, I might add—”

“Oh, I’m sure your drawing lessons were _very_ taxing—”

“—so don’t you dare come into my room and tell me about what I can and can’t do.” Rey straightens her back, drawing herself up to her full height; he could rest his chin on her head if he wanted to. “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“I know you’re not in any way qualified to work here. You just graduated,” Ben points out. “As an _art_ major, no less. Your degree isn’t even in education.”

“Oh, and yours is? Because I’ve never seen a high school counselor walking around wearing a Rolex before. What are you, an i-banker? Did you embezzle funds from charity? Were you a lawyer who snorted up most of his salary?” There must be something that shows in his face, some twitch giving him away. Ben’s always hated that: how he gives himself away. Snoke laid into him for it more than once. “Ah,” she says smugly, a triumphant smirk settling on her delicate features. “A barrister then. What kind of law were you in? Getting criminals off easy? Finding tax loopholes for billionaires?”

“Family law,” he grinds out. Forget about nibbling on her neck—he’d much rather unhinge his jaw like a snake and swallow her whole. He’d like to gnaw on her bones, chew the meat of her legs until he’s finally full of her. Satiated. Anything to get that annoying expression off her face.

She adjusts her arms, and Ben finally sees the mouth-shaped bruise on the inside of her forearm, teeth marks wreathing it. He resists the illogical urge to grab her wrist and check the damage himself.

“Figures,” she says. “Charging people in pain up the ass for the privilege of using children as bargaining tools.”

“You are making a hell of a lot of assumptions about me, sweetheart,” he hisses, bringing his face the slightest bit closer to hers. She doesn’t so much as flinch.

“Funny,” she says, her voice hard as ice, “I was just thinking the exact same thing.”

For a moment, they just—stare at each other. Ben allows himself this one thing: to fill his eyes with her, letting them drift along the curve of her chin, the languid bow of her lips. When his eyes drop to the floor, he can see she’s wearing a pair of sinfully ugly clogs, thick woolen socks hiding her ankles. Ben grimaces. He _hates_ them.

He hates _her_.

He narrows his eyes, frowning, and takes a step back. “Well, if you’re so sure you have everything in hand.”

“I am,” she spits.

“ _Perfect_.”

He walks away from her, clenching his hands into fists, wondering if could get away with skipping his professional learning community period to go scream his frustration to the sound of death metal in his car. He doesn’t even listen to death metal, but.

“Be sure the door doesn’t hit you on the way out, Mr. Solo,” she calls in a mocking sing-song as he opens the door, and Ben, well. Ben has never been famous for his restraint. He can’t resist getting in the last word.

“Go see the nurse before that war wound gets infected, Ms. Jackson,” he says, with a voice gone all low and soft. Across the length of the room, Rey’s hands fall to her sides, her mouth opening in the faintest surprise. He adds, almost as an afterthought, “We wouldn’t want you to have to saw that lovely arm off.”

Ben lets the door fall closed before she can get in one final remark under the wire. At least, he comforts himself as he makes his way back out of her building and into his own, they are in completely different departments in a sprawlingly large school. He’s happy that he won’t be forced to interact with her again.

He’s pretty sure he’s happy about that, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [He _hates_ her. This girl. This garbage picker. This amateur[...] And yet[!]](https://www.google.com/amp/s/ew.com/movies/2017/11/19/star-wars-kylo-ren-vs-rey-the-last-jedi/amp/)


	2. the little mouse, the red, ripe strawberry, and the big, hungry bear

** 2\. the little mouse, the red, ripe strawberry, and the big, hungry bear**

For the next month, Ben decides he does not really even want to think about Rey.

The problem is, now that he knows of her existence, now that he has met her and her face is a face that he would be able to pick out in a police lineup, Ben sees her everywhere, as if she is some new word that he just learned.

And it really is _everywhere_.

The week after he meets her, he passes her in the hallway of the lower school on his way to Holdo’s room to pick up his wayward charge. Rey rolls her eyes at him as she walks by, whispering something he can’t quite catch into the ear of the male first grade teacher she’s walking with, the local hero one. As he catches Ben’s eye, the man snorts loudly, breaking into a fit of laughter until Rey, giggling, shushes him.

Ben frowns as he walks away, trying to push the incident out of his mind. He thinks about it for the rest of the day anyway.

It is not because he likes the sound of her laugh. It’s not a good laugh, too sweet and light and joyful. Ben hates joy. Rey laughs with her whole body, shoulders shaking, nose scrunching up, and he does not care for it one iota.

He discovers a few weeks later, on a Monday, that the shitbox car in the faculty parking lot belongs to her. He finds this out early one morning, when he’s sitting in his own car, taking a few minutes to relax before officially starting his day. Ben sees Rey emerging from the hunk of metal one might charitably call an automobile. She has a donut in one hand and a mug with the words _I TEACH WHAT’S YOUR SUPERPOWER_ (he groans in secondhand embarrassment) in the other.

The donut is strawberry iced. With sprinkles. Ben does not make a note of this in his mind; instead, the fact of it just seems to stick, like a bug splattered on a windshield.

For the entire week, he keeps craving the taste of strawberries. He gets some from the farmer’s market that Saturday, but only, he reassures himself, because they are in season.

Ben can’t even escape her in his own god damn neighborhood. He sees her one day when he’s out getting groceries, walking from the store to his car. He looks up, and suddenly there she is, jogging in place at the stoplight next to Whole Foods, her stupid three buns bouncing with every movement of her body.

Ben nearly drops his reusable grocery bag.

She’s wearing pink sneakers, bright orange running shorts that cling to her ass ( _Jesus fuck, her ass_ ), and some strappy kind of sports bra situation that bares her stomach and does so very little to discourage his imagination from wreaking havoc on his mental state.

Rey doesn’t so much as glance in his direction. She’s gone as soon as the walk light blinks to green, hair bouncing behind her.

Later, he consoles himself that, after all, he is a man, and it is perfectly normal, healthy even, to think about what a woman might possibly look like naked. There is no deeper meaning, and it is nothing for him to concern himself about. Ben can completely thank his biology as a heterosexual human male for the incident, and, with that reassurance, he calls it a fucking day.

The point being: Ben can’t seem to escape her. She invades his reality just like she invaded his workplace. Like an evil, attractive, poisonous fungus.

He’s still not totally sure what her being attractive has to do with it. It still feels important to include.

The first open house of the year happens in the middle of September. His mother strong-arms him into attending.

 _You have skipped far too many staff meetings, Benjamin_ , are the exact words she uses.

“If you don’t put on a happy face at this open house,” she goes on, “I will have no choice but to pull out the big guns.”

Ben scoffs. “I’m so sure.”

Leia glares at him. “I will invite my brother to Thanksgiving dinner this year. My brother _and_ Lando.”

His eyes widen, and, just like that, the battle is lost.

As such: the open house.

It’s on a Saturday morning. There has been a sign-up sheet in the admin office for weeks, different names written in bubbly letters with multicolor pens volunteering to man different stations around the school. He sees Rey’s name written in neat cursive in green ink next to the job of serving breakfasts in the lunchroom.

Of course she would use a green pen. Of course.

Ben grumbles the entire time he signs his name, making sure he chooses something on the opposite end of the school, in the library for the upper school. He’ll be forced to interact with Hux that way, but it’s a small price to pay to avoid seeing the bane of his existence, the woman who has almost ruined Whole Foods for him.

His cautious planning doesn’t do jack shit, though, because it doesn’t prevent Ben from running into her the day of the open house anyway.

It’s because he’s late getting there. He was never late for anything when he was still working at the firm, but, after he started in education, he slacked off a bit. Letting himself laze around for a moment in bed, reading an article from _The L.A. Times_ on his phone during breakfast, taking longer showers. Even when he is a little bit late to work, there is almost always someone else getting in later, making him look better by comparison. As long as he picks up the right kids on time and gets his work done, no one really cares.

It is so much less stressful, to be perfectly honest.

This particular Saturday morning, he’s late because he masturbates in the shower.

He decides to blame everything that happens next on his inability to watch porn.

If he hadn’t been lectured about the exploitation of women in the sex work industry since he was fourteen, he would probably be a normal person who could get off to digital pornography just like everybody else. Instead, any time he attempts to wade through various x-rated websites for something remotely tantalizing, sandwiched between hundreds of things that make him want to throw away his computer, all he can hear is his mother’s second wave feminist voice in his head, citing sex trafficking statistics, going into far too much graphic detail about the likely abusive treatment of the actresses, and wrapping up the lecture with an unending commentary on the slow degradation of healthy sexuality because of internet porn. Overwhelmingly, he ends up feeling like he doesn’t want to masturbate anymore, maybe forever, his distaste always coupled with a vague, creeping sense of guilt and shame.

As a result, Ben has to rely almost solely on his imagination.

He can also admit that it’s probably because it’s been a while since he’s had sex. But when he tries to picture previous, somewhat dissatisfying trysts, he can’t think of anything aside from Danielle’s perpetually cold hands, or the way Brianna had accidentally scraped her teeth against his dick every single time she gave head, without fail. It is all very much the opposite of erotic.

As he palms his cock, trying to conjure up something that won’t make him feel disgusted with himself, he reaches further back, to when he was a preteen, seeing Minnie Driver in _Grosse Pointe Blank_ for the first time at the age of thirteen. A formative fucking experience. No, even better— _Good Will Hunting_ when he was fifteen. Minnie Driver with her square jaw, her long brown hair, in 1997. Her jeans and her English accent.

English accent.

Rey has an English accent.

Ben shakes his head, water dripping into his eyes. Bad thought. Bad, bad thought. He hates her.

So not Minnie Driver then, someone else. He wracks his brain for someone—Jennifer Garner in _Alias_. Wearing a wig, so he doesn’t think about her brown hair. _Focus, Solo_. Jennifer Garner kicking ass and taking names, grinning so wide you can see her dimples.

Dimples.

Rey has dimples.

She has never once smiled at him, but she has dimples. Rey, and her ass in those short as fuck leggings. The muscles of her calves, the curve of her spine visible below the little, tiny bra she was wearing, all of her bouncing. He wants to lick the length of her back. Ben strokes faster, his breath leaving him in sharp bursts of air. Rey when she glared at him and folded her arms across her chest, pushing up her tits—fuck, her tits, he wonders what they’d look like in his hands. One of his palms presses to the white tiles of his shower wall, the water beating down hotly on his back while he thumbs the head of his cock, whining a little. The entire room feels too confining, overheated. He wonders if he might pass out, because this—this is the worst thing he’s ever done, sexually speaking. He should probably be ashamed of himself.

He’s not, though.

He’s not going to make himself stop either.

He pictures her while he jerks off: Rey in those awful fucking way-too-tight shorts, he’ll peel them off her legs like the skin of an orange and let himself drink in the sight of her pretty little cunt. She can leave the pink shoes on when he fucks her from behind, he’ll rip her hair out of that terrible style and wrap it around his fist. She hates him but she’ll like it anyway, she’ll hate him all the more for how much she wants him, how good he can make her feel—Ben grips the base of his shaft, trying to make it last longer, wanting to enjoy it while he’s still too out of his mind to realize what a terrible, idiotic thing he’s doing—he will pick her up and bite a bruise into her neck and she’ll, breathless, say his name and ask him to fuck her, beg him so nicely, maybe she’ll even say please, _please, Ben, fuck me_ , and he’s a gentleman, after all, he will oblige, he’ll bend her over his desk and—

“ _Fuck_.”

Ben groans when he comes, almost doubling over as he spills himself onto the floor of the tub. “Fuck, god damn it, fucking _shit_ —”

Heaving, he lets the water wash all the evidence of the horrible thing he just did down the drain. He stays under the showerhead until it gets cold and gets dressed as quickly as he can, trying to erase the memory, trying to remember the exact Oscar Wilde quote that will make it all go down easier.

Everything is about sex except sex, right? Because sex is about power? Or something like that? Right? So it's not really about having sex with her, he knows, it's about dominating her, making her want him even against her better instincts, getting her so worked up she has to beg him for mercy, which he gets to then magnanimously give her.

Which is definitely a totally normal thing to think about with someone he hates, so there.

(He hates Hux too, and has never once imagined fucking him, but that's beside the point.)

And that is why he is ten minutes late to the open house. And, conspicuously, the last faculty member there. 

Due to the number of families attending, their Teslas and Priuses and Porsches cluttering every available space in the lot, Ben is forced to park next to the piece of junk Rey apparently uses as a facsimile of a car, shoving open his door and hissing a curse when it opens directly into hers.

“Shit,” he mutters, his bad mood spiking that much higher. Ben is angry: angry with Rey for parking almost right on the line, angry with himself for being late, angry with himself for _why_ he's late, angry at the fact of his existence at the school on a Saturday morning. He stands up to check the damage on his door—no scratch at least, thank God for that. Then, he leans down to check if the paint on her passenger side is chipped. Not that it would make much of a difference anyway—that door is a dim, faded red while the rest of her car is some weird mix of beige and gray. Ben doesn’t even know what he’d call that color. It certainly isn’t one he’s seen before.

The paint is scratched. Barely. Hardly noticable, really. He’s probably fine just leaving it and walking away—

“Did you just ding my car?”

Ben freezes. He straightens up to see Rey standing between the bumpers of their respective cars, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.

He considers what the right move would be in this situation; he decides he is equally fucked no matter what he does.

“Yeah.” He can practically see the steam coming out of her ears at the word, and it almost makes him smile. He stops himself from actually doing it at the last moment. “You were way too close to the line.”

“You weren’t paying attention,” she hurls back.

“At least _I_ parked correctly.”

“ _And_ you’re ten minutes late.”

He smirks. “Yet here we both are in the parking lot.”

“Not that it's your business,” she says, her expression livid, “I left something in my car.”

Ben cocks his head to the side as he looks her up and down, taking in a gauzy-looking white blouse tucked into high-waisted jeans, flowers embroidered along her neckline, tassels from the collar of her shirt falling over her tits, and, Christ, her tits, and _—_ _shit_ , he hopes she doesn't think he's checking her out, as if he would _ever._ “What did you forget?” he asks, before he can get distracted any further.

Rey sputters. “That’s none of your business!”

Good. She didn't seem to notice his momentary lapse of sanity. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

She rolls her eyes in what seems to be her favorite expression of utter disdain. “Just go inside, already. Dr. Organa is looking for you.”

Ben furrows his brow. “She can wait. This shit’s not time sensitive, I’m not a fucking bomb squad.”

“You should be nicer to your mother,” she tells him loftily.

“I am nice to my mother, so you can just keep your opinions about it to your—” He stops abruptly, suddenly realizing. “Wait—how did _you_ know she’s my mother?” 

Rey lets out a huff of laughter, airy and mean. “How anyone learns any new information, Mr. Solo. Someone told me.”

There is something irrationally exciting to him about this idea, that Rey learned something about him, that she holds him in her mind, even if it's just information she can use as a weapon against him. Even if only for yet another method of irritation. He narrows his eyes. “Whatever.”

He starts to walk toward her, between their cars, but Rey doesn’t budge out of the way. Ben glares down at her when he is forced into stopping half a foot from her. It is...far too close for comfort. If he moves his hand just the slightest amount, he'll be touching the swell of her hip. “Move,” he grits out.

“Wow. You're unbelievable.” Ben stares at her, hoping his expression can convey accurately the exact level of his annoyed confusion. Which is: very high. “Are you not even going to offer to pay for the damage?”

Ben widens his eyes in bewildered amazement. “You can barely see the scratch. Any amount of money I gave you would be wasted on this piece of shit car.”

Rey opens her mouth for a moment and closes it again, seething. “What the _fuck_ is your problem?”

“This thing can’t be worth any more than the money you spend on gas. What’s the point of trying to pretend like it’s worth fixing, let alone driving?”

Rey glares up at him, her entire body nearly vibrating with the strength of her fury. It is just so damn _satisfying_. “Because it’s _my_ car and _you_ dented it and even if I was going to decline the money anyway, offering to pay for the damage is a thing we do in a civilized society!”

Ben nods his head, as if he is giving her words a great deal of thought. “Well, I guess I’m just uncivilized,” he says eventually.

Rey crosses her arms, tilting her chin up. “You want to know what I think?”

“Go ahead, Ms. Jackson. You’re clearly dying to tell me.”

“I think you’re a real prick,” she grinds out through her teeth. “I think you think this job is beneath you, or maybe that I’m beneath you—” _do not think about her beneath you, that’s a bad wrong inappropriate you’re going straight to hell kind of idea—_ “but I’m not. I deserve to be here, and I won’t be scared away by some pretentious, entitled asshole with a superiority complex.”

Ben does grin at that, unable to resist. He lays one hand over his heart in mock pain. “Oh god, you wound me.”

“ _Just—_ ” Rey takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, like she is using every ounce of her willpower to calm herself down. The gesture makes Ben think, suddenly, of when he was a child, a nice older woman sitting alone with him in the corner of the classroom, telling him to count. One, two, three, four, five. _Use your words, honey, screaming’s not going to get you what you want._

Rey opens her eyes and stares at him evenly. “Go help your mother.”

He glances pointedly behind her, at the ivy-covered brick of the school building. “I’d love to, I really would. But you’re in my way.”

She clenches her jaw and steps to the side, finally allowing him to pass. Ben sidesteps her neatly, murmuring a quiet, “Thank you,” as he passes.

Ben glances back to watch when Rey scoffs loudly, striding past him and forcing her key into the lock of the passenger door (she doesn’t even have a key-fob, it’s almost heartbreaking how shitty her car is). She jerks open the door and leans inside to root for something in the glove compartment. “You are just ever so welcome,” she calls back with her head still in the vehicle, her voice, even muffled, oozing all kinds of violent dislike.

Ben lets himself linger on the sight of her bending over like that for just a moment longer—he should probably report her to some kind of school authority for wearing jeans that tight, there must be some kind of rule against allowing a hot, young teacher to wear something that painfully tempting, it could very well make any one of these lame elementary school fathers abandon their families and all responsibility—and then he turns on his heel and makes himself walk into the building before she can emerge from the car and catch him looking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I can’t move, I can’t talk, I can’t sleep, I can’t walk. ](https://youtu.be/vcChc5a5Ps4)


	3. the grouchy ladybug

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am working on finishing the last chapter of my other fic and it’s slow going but it should be up sometime next week! in the meanwhile pls accept this humble offering of some self-indulgent bullshit :)

** 3\. the grouchy ladybug**

Ben thinks he should really be given much more credit for his attendance at the open house than he actually receives, but it does achieve the desired result of getting his mother off his fucking case, at least for the day. With that objective in mind, and only that objective, the day qualifies as a success.

When he finally gets to the library, a full twenty-five minutes late, Ben dutifully keeps guard by a series of posters highlighting the many and numbered wonders of the school (a well-staffed classics department! volunteering opportunities galore! highly qualified staff! Ben kind of wants to tear the whole display to shreds with his bare hands). Hux does little but drone on and on about his various petty quibbles with the teenage brats who roll through his library every day and disrupt his peace with their overloud gossiping and occasional attempts to make out in the stacks. Hux and Ben are alone for most of the morning, interrupted here and there by a few parents coming in to ask startlingly specific questions about the presence of specific, nearly esoteric texts in the school.

An example: if they don’t have the entirety of Hegel’s works in the philosophy section then they better get them because how else could Alliance claim to be lovers of intellectual discourse if they don’t even have _Science of Logic_ at immediate hand?

And, alright—Ben has read a little of Hegel before, but Jesus Christ, it’s not that essential.

Hux actually engages with most of the parents whenever they complain, somehow both attempting to reassure them that he will take up their suggestions with the headmistress while at the same time conveying in no uncertain terms that every single book in the library is there on his explicit recommendation and if they are so concerned with making sure their precious little gift has unrestricted access to Hegel, maybe they should take him/her to a public library that has the exact book they are looking for, because there is only so much space in the building and their particular desires are extremely low on his totem pole of priorities.

It’s a frankly impressive display of doublespeak that almost makes Ben respect him. Almost.

Ben, for his part, mostly just stands there and makes small talk with the families, some of them related to his students, others just aspirational helicopter parents who ask him unsettlingly aggressive questions about applications for West Coast colleges. Like, does he think their kid has a shot at getting into Berkeley even with all of those minority students applying and stealing spots from the more deserving (read: wealthier) students, and could he write a recommendation for their daughter, and oh her name is Julia, it’s fine that he’s never met her before but didn’t Ben go to _Stanford_?

By noon, when he finally gets to go home to try to process the screaming mess that is his brain (who is he kidding, he’s not going to attempt that even a little bit), Ben feels like he has been more than reasonably punished for his spotty attendance at staff meetings. Before he leaves, his mother makes him vow not to miss another one, barring any real life deaths that occur and prevent him from showing.

He doesn’t catch so much as the briefest glimpse of Rey on his way out, and he thanks whatever deity there may be for that bit of good fortune.

He doesn’t think about her for the rest of the weekend. Except for in the shower again on Sunday; luckily that, he has already established, doesn’t really count.

At the beginning of October, Ben goes to his first all-faculty meeting of the year. After school on a Friday, the teachers from both the upper and lower schools are all corralled like sheep into the cafeteria for the lower school, as if none of them have anything better to do. Ben walks in, suddenly overwhelmed with the number of people in the room. He doesn't know— _any_ of them. There is never any good reason for him to go to meetings for anything outside of the upper school, really, but whatever. He’s past it.

He spots a table where Poe and Rose are already seated, their heads bent toward each other while they whisper angrily about...fuck if he knows. Probably arguing again about whether Greek or Latin is the better dead language to study. Personally, Ben is pulling for Latin, if only because Poe is always such a dick about the Ancient Greeks inventing democracy, and theater, and the marathon, and generally everything. For someone with not a single drop of Greek blood in his veins, Poe is insanely proud of the achievements of the country.

There is definitely no one else in the room that Ben would be able to stand sitting near (he wonders idly where Rey is sitting, just so he can avoid her), so he heads for that table, tugging his messenger bag off over his shoulder and setting it down on the bench.

He takes a seat on the other side of the table from Poe and Rose, muttering a string of hissed expletives when his knees are shoved up somewhere around his chest. He stretches his legs out under the table, trying and failing to get the least bit comfortable. He is going to go back in time and kill Piaget for kick-starting the whole concept that children are people too, if only for his contribution to the physical toll this miniaturized furniture takes on Ben’s oversized body.

Poe looks up at him when Ben settles in, grinning smugly. “Well, look who's decided to grace us with his presence. Are you sad because Mommy made you go to work on another Saturday?”

God damn it. Ben reminds himself to never tell Poe anything.

“Rose is right about the Romans having an overall superior form of government,” he says.

That seems to do the trick. “No she's fucking _not—”_

“The most important contribution the Greeks ever made was the invention of the Olympics, and I _still_ don't care about it—”

“You're just jealous because you don't get to teach Homer—”

Jesus, this is his favorite part, when they are so worked up they won't even let each other finish a sentence. Poe and Rose get along well ordinarily, being the powerhouses of the language department due to an unfair combination of good looks and a cult of personality, but arguing about dead languages and their various qualities is a well they return to more often than may be healthy. Ben is glad he made it in time to see it.

“ _The Aeneid_ is a superior epic anyway—”

“I'd like you to say that in front of any classics department in any prestigious university, you would be laughed out of the _room—_ ”

“Hey, Poe!” The next interruption, strangely, doesn't come from Rose. The local hero, the new first grade teacher, strides up to the table, plopping down next to Poe on the bench and grinning. “And Rose, what's up?”

Rose smiles vibrantly at Mr. Big Deal, her eyes suddenly dreamy. “Not much,” she murmurs softly. Ben rolls his eyes, already regretting sitting at the teachers’ version of the kiddie table. If he has to witness someone fall in love before his very eyes, he is going to start robbing banks.

“Finn!” So that's his name. “I was wondering when you’d finally show.” Poe nods in his direction, his eyes alight with amusement. “Have you met Ben Solo? He's finally lowered himself enough to join us for a whole faculty meeting.”

Finn holds out his hand across the table, his smile just a bit too knowing for Ben's comfort. “Hey, man, nice to meet you.”

“Yeah,” Ben says, his eyebrows furrowed in light confusion, “likewise. Finn, was it?”

Finn nods, his smile growing wider when his eyes shift to glance over Ben's shoulder. Ben's blood turns to ice in his veins before the other man even says, “Rey! We're over here.”

Ben feels her presence at his side before he actually sees her. There's a warmth to her, even unseen, like she is a spot of hell in the otherwise room-temperature space. He turns his head to look at her, and, god damn it, okay, this is happening. Rey takes a seat at the bench across from Finn. Next to Ben.

Of course. Of course Poe just has to sit at staff meetings with the big deal local hero, and the big deal local hero just has to be all buddy-buddy with Rey. Ben needs a new fucking friend. Although, to be fair, Poe isn't really his friend. More so another male in an overwhelmingly female-dominated profession who happens to be around the same age and is not Armitage Hux.

Rey smiles and says hi to Finn, Poe, and Rose. She does not even glance at him. “Is this agenda serious, do you think?” she asks, her nose wrinkling as she looks down at the paper in her hand. “Are we really doing icebreakers? This is, like, the fourth or fifth staff meeting.”

“The doc always saves icebreakers until like two months into the year,” Poe answers. “So we can just focus on getting our rooms and kids in order. You know, the whole first six weeks thing.”

Ben thinks Rose says something in response to this. And then Finn says something else, and then there is Poe's voice again. And then there is a new voice and a new person at the table, the gardening teacher he thinks is possibly named Hannah, or something like that, who snags a spot on the other side of Rey, forcing her to scoot closer to Ben, which is a whole situation he does not much feel like trying to wrap his head around. All around him, an entire conversation occurs, while his temperature rises steadily until he feels like a lobster, boiling in a pot, about to be stabbed in the head and sliced from throat to stomach. Roasting from the inside out. Why him? What wrong has he done to deserve being forced to sit next to this, this _nuisance_?

 _Well, you haven't exactly been_ great, part of him reasons, but he shuts that thought down right quick. He hasn’t done anything terrible enough to warrant yet another painfully crazy-making interaction with Rey Jackson. He doesn’t think he has, at least. 

Ben grimaces, clenching his jaw. He just won't look at her, that's what he'll do. It's actually the best thing, probably, that she's sitting next to him. This way, he won't have to look at her face across the table, or to worry about where she is in the room. Keep your enemies close, and all that.

Drawing this conclusion, he feels marginally better about the whole thing.

Ben does his best to tune out the dim murmur of their conversation, which switches to tuning out the dim murmur of his mother’s voice as she launches into the beginning announcements and reminders before going into the meat of her agenda for the day: insufferable get-to-know-you activities.

Even just sitting there, his eyes, unfocused, staring toward the front of the lunchroom, he can tell he is growing more and more dazed, feeling his body flood with some strange kind of sensory assault. He realizes it’s because there is some cloyingly sweet smell in the air around him, something that drips into him, clings to his clothes, works its way into his mouth and onto his tongue. It smells like vanilla cream and citrus—makes him think of picking lemons from the tree in his backyard growing up, the taste of clementines when he punches his teeth through the thin membrane holding their liquid insides together, the sharp burst of sour-sweetness on his tongue, the sickening sugary mess of the pure-white frosting on the top of store-bought cupcakes, only perhaps slightly less nauseating. He recognizes, dizzily, that it must be Rey, sitting next to him.

It drives him up the fucking wall. Doesn’t she know she shouldn’t be wearing perfume to teach at an elementary school? God, even he understands that strong scents can be overwhelming to young kids, or just overwhelming in general, and he hates the warm scent of vanilla and the crisp bite of oranges. It’s so fucking overwhelming and god damn _distracting_ —

“Well, I guess we’re stuck together,” Rey is gritting out, annoyed. Ben blinks, and realizes abruptly that Rey is staring at him expectantly. He looks across the table to see Finn and Rose tilting together, chattering animatedly, while Poe and maybe-Hannah have moved to another table entirely and are nodding seriously at each other. Glancing around, it seems like everyone has split off into little dyads.

Ben clears his throat, furrowing his brow. “I—I—” He bites down before he can repeat himself again. Not now, not in front of _her_ —he takes an unsteady breath and focuses on picturing the rest of his sentence in his mind. “I wasn’t paying attention,” he says finally, relieved when the words do exactly what he wants them to. “What exactly are we supposed to be doing?”

Rey sighs, the sound heavy with exasperation. Ben is very careful not to drop his eyes to see what the movement does to her chest. He looks pointedly everywhere but there. He notices she’s wearing dangly earrings that are shaped like half-peeled bananas. How childish, he thinks. How kitschy. How unbearably adorable.

“We’re doing two truths and a lie,” she says testily, “and everyone has already paired off and started so you need to pull it together and get with the program.”

“Jesus. Relax,” Ben says. His suggestion does not seem to be taken to heart; Rey sits up ramrod straight, her eyebrows tilting together even further, telegraphing murder of the most dreadful kind. “I say this with the utmost sincerity: take this less seriously.”

Rey chooses, probably wisely, not to dignify that with a response. “So the game is we’re supposed to say three things, and one of them has to be a lie—”

“I’m familiar.”

“ _Fine_.” She stares at him, and Ben stares back, and for a long moment, neither of them says anything. It is...not the worst thing in the world. “Are you going to start or not?” she snaps.

And, yeah, there she is. “Fine,” he grouses. “Two truths and a lie: my name is Ben, I’m thirty-two, and I’m from California.” He pauses, realizing, “Wait, shit, all of those are true.”

“God, you’re the _worst,_ ” Rey says exasperatedly. “I’ll just go.”

“By all means.” Ben waits while Rey thinks. And thinks, and keeps thinking. After another minute, he can’t contain himself any longer. “You planning on starting sometime this century?”

She rolls her eyes. “Shut up.”

“I think I came up with a lie—”

She cuts him off. “I don’t have a middle name,” she says, “I have broken the same leg twice, and I hate—”

“Me?” he guesses, smirking slightly.

“That would also be true,” she mutters lowly, glaring at him, “so I can’t say it.”

Okay, ouch. But whatever, he hates her, too, and they hate each other, and it’s all just a veritable fucking parade of hate, so. Moving on. “Well, now you’ve given away what was going to be your lie, and we haven’t completed our icebreaker successfully.”

“Because you interrupted me,” she fumes, “and I think at this point the ice is pretty much hammered to shit.”

He decides to do her the courtesy of ignoring that in favor of asking, “You don’t have a middle name?”

“No,” she says shortly.

“Why not?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Whatever,” he says, carefully avoiding acknowledging the fact that he is bluffing, “I don’t really care anyway.”

She crosses her arms, lowering her eyebrows further. “It’s because my parents didn’t care much about middle names.”

“Understandable.” He should know. His middle name is deeply, horrifically embarrassing, and he will never say it aloud to a single soul.

One of Rey’s hands closes into a fist like a slammed door. “They didn’t really care much about anything, really. Probably first names, too.”

Ben knits his eyebrows together. What...is happening. “You do have one of those,” he says slowly.

“Three letters,” she says quietly, her voice harsher than before. But, strangely, her anger doesn’t seem to be directed at him. “They gave me three letters.”

Ben opens his mouth, about to say—something. Something mean and cutting. Something dismissive and cruel. Because he doesn’t give a shit about Rey, and the fact that she’s clearly upset is not an issue for him. He doesn’t care.

He _definitely_ doesn't care.

His mother’s voice, as loud as a megaphone and just as startling, interrupts him before he can formulate any kind of response. He jumps at the sound, suddenly off-kilter.

“Alright, everybody, let’s come back.” Ben turns to watch as Leia gestures for everybody to stand up. “It’s time to switch partners.”

By the time he looks back to where Rey was sitting scarcely a foot away from him, she's already gone, a few tables over with Kaydel, the office’s bookkeeper.

It makes him oddly...disappointed.

Because now he has to stand up and find someone else to pretend to connect with. And that, he knows, is the only reason.

Ben glances around, searching for a new partner who won’t make him feel utterly enraged, and, not finding one, settles for pairing up with Maz.

On Monday, his day starts with an email.

_RE: RESOURCES LIST_

He frowns at his computer, wracking his brain for what this could possibly be in response to. It isn’t until he clicks it open and sees the little circle with Rey’s ID photo inside that he even remembers his email after their first encounter, the email she never sent a reply to, probably because she’s far too arrogant to admit to needing help.

Which she is replying to a month late. Because she is a petty fucking _child_.

(He will not refer to their first...interaction as an _encounter_ , he decides, even in his own head. _Encounter_ implies an element of enjoyment, however vague, and thus far he has not enjoyed one single moment spent in her presence. Not even a little.)

There is one sentence, no exclamation points. Ben has seen Rey’s responses to all-staff email blasts, and knows her usual replies have a minimum of three exclamation points. Not that he’s counted.

_Thank you for the recommendations._

_Rey Jackson_

Ben maybe spends just a hair longer than the ordinary amount of time looking at her ID picture, which shows her smiling with all her teeth, those dimples on full display. It’s because, he thinks, her smile is just so uncomfortably earnest, her entire face lit up with happiness.

It’s an expression Ben has never seen her make. And never will, he’s sure.

The idea doesn’t make him as satisfied as it should.

He makes himself click out of the email after a few seconds, and, after a moment of thought, deletes it from his inbox.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I am a lazy git, she is as pure as the cold-driven snow. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HdAplWpqWA)


	4. my no, no, no day

** 4\. my no, no, no day**

  
Holdo barely glances at him when Ben comes into her classroom. She is a woman long since used to people coming in and out of her room for pull-outs, push-ins, walk-throughs, look-sees, and every other kind of interruption one could possibly imagine. It is because she is, he knows for a fact, the best teacher they have in the third grade. It’s exactly why she was given Kyle in the first place. An unfortunate element of elementary school teaching, he's noticed: the better you are, the harder the kids. Ben has seen her in action already, seen her teach during an observation of Kyle in his regular classroom environment a week or so earlier. Ben now can fully appreciate all the praise that Holdo gets for what it is: accurate.

She smiles slightly at Ben as he approaches the table where Kyle is scrawling with purposeful determination on a sheet of writing paper. It’s her classroom’s independent choice time, and her other students are located at various centers around the room, each of them focused and concentrated and extremely attentive to each of the tasks they are seeing about accomplishing. “You here to pick up our mutual friend?” she asks softly.

Ben nods, and she smiles wider, her attention shifting to Kyle. “Mr. Solo is here to pick you up, honey,” she says in that same gentle voice. She turns to leave, her eyes bright, and murmurs quietly to Ben as she passes, “Be sure to ask about what he’s writing.”

Ben nods and looks down at Kyle’s paper, furrowing his brow at the copious amount of hearts and flowers lining the border. In the middle of the square box for illustrations is an oval-shaped girl with brown hair, a scribbled pencil-looking thing in her hand. “What are you working on, kid?” he asks.

Kyle doesn’t look up at him when he answers, still too fixed on his drawing. “I’m writing a letter.”

Ben frowns, considering the paper. “It looks more like a drawing.”

“I haven’t written the sentences yet.” The boy’s hand flies to the top of the paper, painstakingly etching the letters in childish manuscript _You are very_ in red colored pencil. He pauses for a moment, then adds in the letters _pr_.

“How do you spell pretty again?” he asks, large, dark brown eyes sliding up to Ben. “What’s the next letter?”

He's not supposed to hand him the answer, as his mother has forcefully impressed on him so many times, so Ben asks instead, “What do you think it is?”

Kyle’s eyes narrow in concentration. “I?” he guesses, sounding unsure.

Well, he gave it a shot. No point in torturing the kid further. “It sounds like an I, but it’s an E.”

Kyle nods, looking more sure, and fills in the rest of the word: _pretty_. He sits back, satisfied, before leaning back in to write underneath _You are my favorit teacher!_

“You’re missing an E there.” Ben points down at the paper, and Kyle mumbles, “Oh, right,” hurrying to correct it. Ben watches him for a moment longer, a smile breaking onto his face despite himself. The whole thing is actually kind of...sweet. “Who is this letter for anyway?”

“Miss Jackson,” Kyle says absently as he continues on his task. “How do you spell Impressionist?”

Ben blinks. It takes him a moment to find his voice enough to say, “That one’s a little long. Are you ready for it?”

He nods, and Ben starts to dictate aloud, watching as Kyle carefully transcribes each letter on the page. After he finishes spelling the word, Ben takes the chair next to the kid’s, silently cursing both his own height and the size of the chair. “Ms. Jackson is your favorite teacher, huh?”

Kyle nods, coloring the flat, oval-shaped Rey red. Red, red, red: an obsession of his, apparently, since he was old enough to know what colors are. Ben has no idea what it is about the color that draws every trouble child to it; it was his favorite, too, back when he still had something like a favorite color.

“You didn't like her very much when you first met,” Ben points out. “Why is she your favorite now?”

The little bastard actually shrugs at the question. “She’s really nice,” he says slowly, thoughtfully, “and she teaches us a lot about art. She didn’t get mad at me even though I bit her.” He pauses, scribbling a tiny, cartoon version of himself on the page, his mouth too big for his head, with too many teeth, his eyebrows big and angry. “She says I’m like Max,” he continues, almost offhandedly.

“Who’s Max?” Ben clears his throat, dropping his eyes back to the paper. “Is Max her friend?”

Kyle laughs, a short burst of sound. “No, Max is from _Where the Wild Things Are_. Max gets angry and he's bad sometimes, but his mom still loves him and gives him dinner even when he’s mean.”

“Right,” Ben says. “That makes sense.”

Kyle shrugs again, sighing heavily as he draws, seeming to turn this idea over in his mind. “I like third grade better than second grade,” he says, his voice soft.

“Second grade was a tough year for you,” Ben acknowledges evenly. A very tough year, really, Ben’s first year with him. Within the span of the summer between first grade and second, the kid went through a massive growth spurt, shooting up to be the tallest kid in his class, his parents got divorced, his dad moved to another city hours away, and his tantrums went from once or twice every few days, as they were in first grade, to three or four times a day, every day. It took Ben a good two months to build up enough of a rapport that Kyle wouldn’t outright attack him every single time they had a session. By the end of the year, his tantrums were down to once every week or so, lasting a few minutes at a time rather than twenty or thirty. His poor second grade teacher; Ben is honestly shocked she didn't go for an early retirement after that. Leia spent most of her time in the lower school that year, doing little more than waiting on standby in case Kyle needed to be calmed, or de-escalated, or simply removed.

Ben is glad that the kid’s momentary lapse in the art room didn’t appear to set him back too much.

And, alright, _fine_ —maybe he should have done a better job of warning all of the teachers about his schedule change, and made sure Amilyn remembered, and reminded Kyle more than just one or two times. But Ben isn’t completely accustomed to elementary school counseling, such as it is, and _whatever_ , he’s still right about Rey being too inexperienced to handle the kid. He wonders, idly, if he should see about observing Kyle in her classroom, just to get a sense of why the kid likes her so much. From a purely professional standpoint.

Kyle signs his name at the bottom of his paper, folding it in half and writing in big letters on the outside, _TO MISS JACKSON FROM KYLE I LOVE YOU_. “Have you met Miss Jackson?” he asks curiously, his eyebrows knitting together as he stares at Ben.

Ben looks at Kyle from the corner of his eye warily. “Yes,” he says, drawing the word out into two syllables.

Kyle cocks his head. “Do you like her?”

“I don’t really know her,” Ben says slowly. He is growing increasingly concerned with the kid’s line of questioning. It feels a little like an open manhole—something waiting to trap him in its belly.

Kyle looks up at him with those wide, staring eyes. “Do _you_ think she’s pretty?” he asks plainly, matter-of-fact.

Ben knows there can be no right answer to this question. He forces himself to shrug, and he stand ups without answering. "Finish up, kid,” he says, jerking his head toward the door. "Let's go."

  
Ben is definitely being punished for something. He is absolutely positive.

There can be no other explanation for the note on the door to the upper school copy room: _PRINTER OUT OF ORDER_. It would also explain why, when he goes into the lower school’s copy room which, it seems, doubles as a faculty lounge, he is confronted with the sight of Rey, sitting on the couch and shoveling Flaming Hot Cheetos into her mouth like she’s trying to win a contest. She is the only other person in the room; the moment she looks up and sees him at the door, she murmurs in between handfuls of Cheetos, “Oh, god damn it.”

Ben pretends he didn’t hear that. He nods stiffly, taking a seat at the circular table in the middle of the room to pull up the document he needs to have printed. He winces when he sees the number of pages, trying to mentally calculate how long he will be trapped in this tiny room with her.

A room, he thinks as he adjusts his position in his chair, uncrossing and recrossing his overlong legs, that seems to be getting smaller every minute. He’s a barely five feet away from her, but he can still smell that horrifying, insufferable sweetness she seems to think qualifies as perfume. It makes him think of orange groves, the bitter tang of lemon, and vanilla cake. It makes him wonder if she tastes the same way.

He shoves that idle thought out of his head as quickly as he can.

Ben wishes he were anywhere else, with anyone else.

The feeling, naturally, is mutual.

Rey glares at nothing in particular, studiously avoiding looking in his direction, as she crumples up the now-empty plastic bag in her clean hand. The other, covered with orange dust from a snack better suited for the children she teaches rather than an ostensibly grown woman, she wipes down with a napkin. It doesn’t seem to do the trick; her fingers are still orange and red. She seems to notice this at the same time as Ben, and she lets out a little sound of irritation.

Carefully, her eyes downcast, she brings the tips of her fingers to her mouth and she—

 _—licks_ them. Her pink tongue darting out, kittenish, to clean the rest of the powder off her skin.

As soon as he sees her tongue lick a stripe up her index finger, Ben forces himself to stare at his computer, watching the loading bar linger at 34 Percent Ready To Print. His hand is clenched in a fist on top of his thigh. He feels like he wants to die, a little.

It’s been five minutes since he entered the room, and neither of them has verbally acknowledged the existence of the other yet.

After another three minutes, when the printer has, at long last, started to churn out his papers achingly slow, Ben is the first person to break the silence.

“Our printer is broken,” he says by way of explanation. It is a reassurance that he wants to be in the room with her as little as she wants him to be there.

Rey doesn’t look at him when she responds, pointedly reaching into her navy blue lunch bag, a big yellow M on the front flap, to pull out a kiwi. It seems like the kind of thing given away for free at college events, and Ben wonders why she doesn’t spring for something closer to her sense of style—i.e., tacky. “I know that,” she says snippily as she stands to wash the fruit off in the sink in the corner of the room near the fridge. “There’s already been, like, four different teachers using up all the colored ink. What do high school teachers even need colored ink for?”

“Do you think I would know?” he snaps.

Rey rolls her eyes to the ceiling as she walks back to the couch, but she still doesn’t look at him. Which. Is just _all manner_ of infuriating.

Ben _wants_ her to look at him.

He opens his mouth, perhaps to say something both cutting and quick-witted, but at that moment Rey lifts the kiwi to her mouth and—

 _Bites_ it. Like an apple.

Ben stares at her, suddenly slack-jawed. “What the fuck?” he hears himself say.

Rey glances up at him as she eats, still tearing into the kiwi with reckless abandon. “What?” she mumbles around a mouth full of green fruit flesh and black seeds.

She is— _insane_. That has to be it. It would explain so many things. “Why,” he says carefully, the words deliberate, “are you eating it like that?”

Rey has the audacity to shrug and make a face. “How else are you supposed to eat it?” As if _he_ is the crazy one.

“Normal people would cut it into sections.”

She stares at him blankly, that expression of utter contempt still fixed on her face. “That’s just an extra step to end up with the same thing,” she says stubbornly.

Raised by wolves, he thinks distantly, that’s it. She is Romulus and Remus and _l’enfant sauvage_ and the entire rest of the Wikipedia section on feral children. No god damn table manners. “But at least,” he grits out, “I wouldn’t be forced to sit here and watch while you eat kiwi incorrectly and talk with your mouth full.”

Rey smacks her lips together even louder, and Ben lifts his eyes to the ceiling, begging some deity for the patience he needs not to completely lose it. She is just so immature. “Then close your eyes,” she says, her voice mocking.

Ben grips the edge of the table, white-knuckled, a man on the edge. This is _definitely_ some kind of karmic retribution. It was probably that woman who tried to curse him after he got full custody of her daughter for her asshole ex-husband. After all, she did say he would live to regret his actions. He already does regret that, and most of what he did at the firm, but that probably wasn’t enough in the eyes of whatever earth mother spirit she prayed would smite him.

Ben feels smitten. Smote. Whatever the word is.

He drops his eyes to his computer screen. 50 out of 207 pages. He hopes someone will come murder him before he has an aneurysm from sheer frustration. “I can still hear you eating,” he hisses.

“Then _leave,_ ” she says harshly. When he looks up, she is glaring at him, her nose scrunched up in impotent fury. “You can pick up your papers later. No one is going to steal them.”

Ben blinks. The idea of leaving hadn’t actually occurred to him. It would, he thinks, probably be easier for both of them.

Still. It's the principle of the thing. “I’m not walking all the way back to my office and then coming all the way back here.” 

“Well, if you’re not leaving, I’m not leaving either. This is _my_ lunch hour, and you will not ruin it for me.”

“Then I guess we’re stuck with each other.”

“Suit yourself,” she says coldly.

“I will.”

He stares at her, and she stares back, neither of them blinking. The offending piece of fruit has been gnawed down to practically nothing, the only piece remaining of it the hard root of the stem at the bottom. Rey’s hands are wet, covered with stray bits of kiwi, a few tiny black seeds stuck between her fingers. Her skin is probably sticky with juice, tart and sweet and sour. There is a sudden wave of _something_ that rolls through him, almost crippling, and he wants, with a ferocity that borders on painful, to see her clean up the mess again with her pink tongue, her mouth smearing open and wet as she trails her lips across her palm. Or better yet: he wants to hold her by the wrist and pull those slender fingers into his mouth himself. Suck her clean. Bite her knuckles and trace his tongue up the inside of her arm and—

 _Bad thought,_ he thinks with an abrupt panic. _Bad thought. Do not think this terrible awful thought. You are at work and she is a_ person _at your work and you hate her and this is a bad thought._

They still haven't looked away from each other. The space around them feels like the moment before a lightning strike: like something is about to catch on fucking fire. Ben tears his eyes away in a manner that borders dangerously on reluctant. 112 pages printed.

Ben has no idea if he can make it to 207. He feels slightly unhinged, a scrawl of a person. How on earth is _she_ the lovely, nice, favorite teacher of the most notoriously difficult kid in the lower school?

He is just about to get up and admit defeat when the door opens again, and, oh, thank fuck, it’s someone else.

Rey’s attention switches from Ben to the newcomer, and her expression lights up in relieved happiness. “Finn!”

Oh. The big deal. _Great_.

Ben watches Finn as he walks to the sofa to sit beside Rey, grinning as he drops his lunch bag on the table in front of them. Rey gazes up at Finn like he is her savior and her best friend and her favorite thing in the whole wide world. Her smile takes up her entire face, her eyes crinkled and shining with joy, and the moment Finn sits down next to her she doesn't glance back at Ben even once.

It makes Ben more annoyed than it should.

“Hey, Solo,” Finn says casually, nodding in greeting. “What’s up?”

Ben nods in return, forcing what he hopes is an expression of relaxed nonchalance onto his face. It feels more like a grimace. He resists the urge to tell Finn not to call him Solo.

189 pages.

He tries to ignore most of their quiet conversation. He is deeply, incredibly uninterested in the various things either of them might mistakenly believe passes for important. Apparently, some show called _The Good Place_ is fucking amazing. There is a movie on Amazon Prime that one of them wants to watch later, even though they both agree that Jeff Bezos should not be given any more of their hard earned money. Also, it seems that Finn needs to restock their supply of paper towels because they are almost out at the apartment.

Ben furrows his brow, belatedly processing the sentence. Their apartment. The one they live in together. He digs his fingernails into his palm, considering this: Finn and Rey. Dating. Living together. In a serious relationship, obviously.

Which, okay, cool. Bully for her. As if a woman who looks like her would be single, and it’s not like the fact of her relationship status has anything to do with him. And why would it matter, part of him whispers bitterly, whether she’s single or not. It’s not like he—

The printer chugs and churns, finally groaning out the 207th page from his document. Ben practically leaps out of his chair at the sound, haphazardly throwing together the thick stack of papers until it resembles some semblance of a pile. He needs to sort through the pages and three-hole punch them, sure, but suddenly he can't stand being in this ridiculously small room any longer. He books it out with his laptop and printed documents without so much as a backwards glance and makes his way back over to the upper school as fast as he can without outright running.

On the way, he passes by the _other_ copy room in the lower school, a blissfully empty space with no one and nothing in it but a bulky, industrial printer, a laminating machine, and a wall lined with shelves for various office supplies. Because, of course, there are two, and he just had to pick the one with Rey Jackson in it.

He decides in that moment that, yeah. He's definitely being punished for something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Well, I'm so above you, and it's plain to see. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU5PPnv_UHk)


	5. the little prince

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen: ben is a big dumb idiot asshole and this whole chapter is him being calvin to rey's susie derkins complete with a misspelled NO GIRLS ALLOWED sign on his treehouse. there are better times ahead. far, far ahead.
> 
> think that tumblr post where the girl didn’t know how to deal with a crush so she wrote a note that just said GET OUT OF MY SCHOOL. this is like that.

** 5\. the little prince**

In the middle of October, Ben decides one morning that he needs children’s writing paper.

This is a statement he never once anticipated would be applicable to him.

He needs children’s writing paper because Kyle has suddenly, with almost no warning, become some kind of savant of the written word. According to Amilyn, he writes down everything now: all of his thoughts, and feelings, and opinions about his reality. Ben figures it’s a dramatic step up from his usual method of emotional release. That being said, now Ben needs children’s writing paper, preferably a journal of some kind, which can only be found in the lower school.

And, just to be clear: Ben is not an idiot.

There are many things that he could be called, but he’s fairly certain that idiot is not one of them. Sure, he had some trouble with grammar and articulation as a child, a stutter, too, and yes, there were the circumstances surrounding his expulsion, namely, that he got into a physical fight with about three other students, and yes, _okay_ , there was the whole thing with trusting Snoke in Los Angeles, and _fine_ , there was a bit of a learning curve when he started out at Alliance four years ago, and it took him a little bit of time to figure his shit out in that arena. But an _idiot_? Never.

He went to _Stanford_. For _law school_.

Still, there can be no other explanation for why, after a session with Kyle, Ben goes to the supply closet rather than just asking Holdo for what he needs. In fact, the idea of just asking Amilyn if she has any spare journals does not cross his mind even once. It isn’t until he’s actually opened the door to the closet see Rey, precariously perched on a step ladder, rooting through the art supplies on the highest shelf, that he realizes, with a curl of dread, that he could have, actually, easily gone into any classroom on the hall and gotten what he needed.

So: Ben is not an idiot, but he is suddenly, brutally aware that he is acting as if he is.

She turns at the sound of the door opening, her face lit in a yellow glow as the light from the hallway filters into the dim room. She sighs heavily the moment she sees him, but otherwise does not react, continuing her search through the shelves. For what, he has no idea. Feathers? Pipe cleaners? Glue sticks?

Because he is acting like an idiot, Ben does not immediately turn around and leave the room. No, that would be too easy and non-terrible a choice. Instead, like always, he digs into his bad decision and starts hunting around for blank journals. One Kyle can take home, he figures, and one to use at school.

For a minute, they both stew in their respective miseries, standing at opposite walls of the room (and, he thinks, for which the word _closet_ is beginning to seem charitable) until Rey, as if something inside her has suddenly snapped, glares down at him from her position standing on the highest step of the ladder and says, “Why are you in here?”

The words are like an accusation hurled in a court of law. He blinks. “I’m getting children's journals,” he says to the shelf in front of him. He realizes he is looking at what appears to be a row of handmade play dough in airtight jars. He has...no idea why he is looking at this shelf.

“It’s not even over there.” Ben looks up at her; he has to crane his neck back to see her face. It is—interesting. It is an interesting thing, looking at her from this perspective. She is wearing a below-the-knee skirt with flowers on it and a pale yellow blouse with puffy sleeves that rides up on her torso when she reaches her arms above her head. He can see the small of her back at eye level, the tanned skin, the curvature of her spine visible behind the tie of her apron, and it is very interesting. And not good, he thinks quickly. Interesting things can also be bad. Also: he should not be ogling the exposed strip of skin of a person who is (ostensibly) his coworker. That is begging for trouble. Also: she is awful, and he does not like her. All of her clothes clash horribly with themselves and with each other, and she continues to persist in the sin of wearing those fucking clogs, and he does not care for it.

Ben looks from her waist to her hand, where she points to the middle of the shelf beside hers. She jerks her arm back up the moment he moves as she works to pull loose a heavy-looking jar with shiny, glittering glass beads inside it. He has enough wherewithal to think that a jar that heavy-looking has no business being placed so far back on a high shelf, but he decides pretty fast that this doesn't really matter to him anyway.

He mutters a quiet, reluctant thanks and bends to grab a couple of spiral-bound notebooks. He flips through them quickly, trying to make sure the spacing is wide enough, that there are plenty of big empty squares for illustrations. _A crash course in elementary ed_ , Leia told him once, _make sure everything has about twice as much space as you think it needs to have_. He straightens up, ready to get the hell of dodge, glad to be rid of the sight of her, when it happens.

Ben hears Rey slip off of the ladder just a few seconds before he actually sees it. Then, everything seems to move very quickly.

Rey, in those ridiculous clunky shoes, moving down from the top step with the jar in her arms. The jar slipping out of her hands and landing with a solid thud on the floor. Her ankle twisting on the lower step, her hands reaching out to grab at the wall, and her eyes wide as she falls backwards.

And Ben—absurdly—instinctively dropping his books and reaching out to catch her before she hits the ground.

Which, to be fair, is only a few feet away.

In the space of a few seconds, Rey is in his arms. He has one hand pressed into her upper back, the other secure under her legs, his fingers clutching the bare skin of her knees. She's heavier than he would have thought, muscled and solid. One of her hands is on his chest, the other still grabbing at nothing.

For a long moment, he just—looks at her. Her shoulders are heaving with shaking breaths, her body trembling with how close she came to hitting the ground. She blinks up at him with her not-quite-green-not-quite-brown eyes, her eyebrows knitting together, lips parted in surprise. For a horrible moment, he grows increasingly concerned that he might lean in closer to her, inhale that tantalizing scent that has been steadily driving him mad in the cramped confines of the room, that he might press his advantage, press his mouth to the skin of her neck, and—

He realizes, with a sudden swoop and pitch in his gut, that he has never touched her before. Worse: he knows instantly that this would not matter if it weren’t Rey he was holding; he would not have even noticed it with anybody else.

It is this sudden thought that finally makes him let her go and set her on her feet, taking a step back from her.

Rey smooths her hands down the front of her apron, this one covered in tiny little cartoon birds. It looks old, the apron, like it's something she found at a thrift store that should have gone out of business in 1993. She does not look at him when she mutters, sounding nearly angry, “You didn't have to do that.”

Ben snaps back into himself the moment she says it. “A normal person would say thank you to someone who saved them from falling off a god damn ladder,” he says, growing more annoyed with each word.

“Saved me?” She scoffs. “It's a drop of about two feet. It's not like you pulled me off the edge of a cliff.”

His hands close automatically into fists. How she manages to get on every single nerve truly boggles his mind. It’s like she was created in a lab for the express purpose of pushing him into an early grave. “Fine. You don't want help, then next time, I'll gladly do nothing.”

“I didn't ask for your help,” she spits out, “and I don't _need_ your help.”

He sneers, “And yet, here you are, directly benefitting from my assistance.”

She narrows her eyes, and Ben realizes slightly too late that he made an error in judgment. He continues, it seems, to underestimate her force of will. It's an understandable mistake, he thinks, since, for most of his life, there has been a limited number of people who even make the attempt to go one-on-one with him. Certainly no one as young and supposedly nice as her. She takes a step closer to him, and, just like that, they are separated by a distance of half a foot. Ben swallows hard, trying to focus, while she attempts to maim him with her eyes.

“Alright,” she says, “then why don't I get back up there and we can have a take two. This time, just let me drop.”

His eyes widen the moment he understands her meaning. “What? Are you insane?”

She tries to get around him to the stepladder by moving to the side, letting out a small noise of irritation when he moves with her, blocking her way. “I don't need you to rescue me. I am perfectly capable—”

“Capability has nothing to do with it,” he interrupts, his voice overloud considering how close they are. And it is—close. _Jesus Christ_. “I am not letting you deliberately swan dive off a stepladder to make some kind of statement about how little you care about my opinion. Just accept that I caught you and move the fuck on.”

She makes an attempt to get around him again, folding her arms across her chest when, once again, he stops her progress. She glares up at him. “Just _move_.”

“No.”

Rey throws her hands down at her side and edges nearer to him, hissing quietly, “What is your issue with me?”

He blinks again. “Excuse me?”

“You have had a problem with me since the moment we met,” she goes on, her voice still dangerously low. “Clearly, this building has some kind of magical property that makes me very unable to avoid you, so let's get it out of the way right now: what the fuck is your damage?”

The question seems like a trap. It feels like one, it sounds like one, and therefore it probably is one.

Ben decides, _fuck it_ , and walks headfirst into it anyway.

“You shouldn't be here,” he mutters darkly. “This is not the place for you.”

“Oh, you think I'm not good enough to teach at a bougie private school with a ratio of ten to one. You classist, elitist motherf—”

He cuts her off before she can descend entirely into a self-righteous rant about how shitty he is. He's heard it all before, and he definitely doesn't need her hot take on the matter. “It's not that I think you're not good enough,” he says. “Who gives a shit if you're good enough? You teach art, not math.”

“There it is again, what exactly do you find so offensive about encouraging a child's love of art?”

“That is beside the point,” he dismisses. “This is your first year. My mother never hires people fresh out of undergrad. You have noticed that, right? It's because most people in education burn out within three years.”

She furrows her brow, a tiny wrinkle of indignation appearing in the middle of her stupid perfect eyebrows. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You are taking this position away from someone who is really dedicated. Who actually knows what they want. The guy I replaced was here for almost forty years. He was _my_ counselor.” Although, Ben does not mention, he’s still not totally sure how much good Lor San Tekka did him in the long run. “Most of these kids spend their entire childhoods in this place. Some of them have better relationships with their teachers than with their own parents. What happens when you decide it's too stressful and leave? How is Kyle going to feel when his favorite teacher moves away because her boyfriend wanted to relocate to San Diego? Or because she just isn't feeling it anymore?”

Rey straightens her back, squaring her shoulders. She is still so close to him, and it’s making it difficult to think. To _breathe_. He doesn't know if he's taken in a complete lungful of air since he stepped into the room. “You don't know anything about me,” she says. “You have no right to act like I can't handle the stress, or like I am going to flake out. I have been handling stress with fucking aplomb for a lot longer than you could possibly imagine. I am damn good at my job, and I don't give a shit what you think.”

“Well, clearly you do,” he throws back at her, “or you wouldn't be trying so hard to convince me I'm wrong.”

It’s not until he says it out loud, until he sees Rey squirm uncomfortably in front of him, that he realizes it might actually be true.

But, then again, probably not.

She stammers, “I—you—you are an _asshole_.”

He doesn’t smile. He might smirk slightly, but it isn’t a smile. “Yeah, let me know when you come up with something new.”

She rolls her eyes. God, she is just— _insufferable_. “Why does it matter so much to you anyway?” she mutters, still annoyed.

“Why does what matter?”

“Why does it matter if I burn out?” She lifts her chin, seeming like she might be trying to intimidate him. Which, yeah, that won't work. He has a good eight or nine inches on her, and she is about half his size in every other respect. “Why do you care about whether or not a lowly little art teacher quits? It wouldn’t even come close to affecting you.”

Ben hesitates; it’s in that moment that he sees something shift in her eyes, an expression that looks a little too much like triumph.

He can’t let her win that easily.

“Because Kyle,” he manages finally, “for some unfathomable reason, likes you. And I'd really hate to see him disappointed again.”

“Well, so would I.” Somehow, she manages to sound both extremely sincere and extremely angry about it. He is very nearly impressed.

“That’s really great then,” he grits out.

She bares her teeth when she replies, “Isn’t it _just_?”

For a moment, they're both quiet. And despite the fact that he is still livid, despite the fact that he just told her he thinks she’s going to quit and leave him— _the school_ , he reminds himself, _the school_ —high and dry, they seem almost simpatico.

At least, he thinks, they both care about the kid.

He pauses, closing his eyes for a moment. It is now almost impossible to breathe, all of his senses flooded with how close she still is. “Then, I guess we are in accord,” he says eventually. 

She snorts, and any semblance of peace he felt is instantly shattered. “ _In accord—_ god, you’re _so_ pretentious.”

“Let’s just try to avoid getting on each others’ nerves,” he snaps.

“I will if you promise to stop being such a joyless douchebag.”

“You are getting awfully judgmental for a twenty-two year old who douses herself in cheap perfume.”

“I’m twenty-three—”

“Like that makes a difference—”

“—and I don’t wear perfume.”

That pulls him up short as fast as a stoplight that blinks too quickly from yellow to red. “But you—” He is going crazy, that _has_ to be it— “You don’t?”

She seems just as confused as him. “No.”

“Then why do you always smell like fucking citrus and vanilla?”

He realizes it’s a mistake the moment he says it. He feels, to an inordinate degree, like someone who has just walked blindly into quicksand, only the kind that makes you sink immediately and drown at the bottom of an endless pit, like in _The Princess Bride_. Not that he would ever openly admit to liking that movie.

Rey’s mouth is open in shock. Probably because a grown man that she works with has just admitted to knowing exactly what she smells like. Because he is creepy and a weirdo and all-around terrible. “First of all, it’s probably just the body wash I use, and second of all, why are you _smelling_ me?”

 _Backtrack, abort, abort, danger, danger Will Robinson_. “It’s impossible not to in this room,” he says, hoping it doesn’t come across in his voice how utterly off-center he feels.

“You said _always_ —”

“No, I didn’t,” he denies quickly.

She is not immediately convinced. Damn her. “Yes, you did.”

He makes himself shrug. He is normal. This is fine. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. “Must have been a slip of the tongue,” he says, somewhat smoothly.

He knows he’s lying; he just hopes she doesn’t know it. Or at least that she will do him the courtesy of pretending like she doesn’t know it.

She does, thank fuck. “Whatever,” she says. “Maybe we should just agree to stay out of each other’s way altogether.”

“Fine by me.”

Ben moves, about to walk past her and out of this hellish situation, when she clears her throat. He turns back to see her pointing to the journals he left on the ground.

“Your notebooks,” she says quietly.

Oh, god. He wants to _die_.

He reluctantly goes back, reaching down and grabbing them as fast as he possibly can without seeming as openly desperate to leave as he is. When he straightens up, they are somehow even closer together than before. He didn't think it was possible. He is going to see someone about expanding any and all supply closets until they can comfortably fit more than one person, because truly, there is no reason for this. There is no reason he should be able to look down at Rey and count every single freckle he sees.

Her face is slightly flushed, some of her hair coming loose from her updo, some kind of braid that curls all the way around her head. Her lips are parted slightly, her pupils wide and black from the low lighting. Fuck her—she has never looked more attractive.

Ben is split somewhere between wanting to ask how the hell she does that with her hair and wanting to go home from work at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday to drown his embarrassment in alcohol and repeated listens of _Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness_. He does neither; he walks away from her and opens the door to the supply closet and vows to never set foot in the lower school again, until the next time he has to go to it.

Which, shit, is in another twenty-four hours.

Maybe he should just fake sick for the rest of the week.

That night, it finally happens. The thing he was unable to admit to himself that he was dreading, that he subconsciously knew was all but guaranteed.

That is: Ben has a sex dream about Rey.

He knows he’s dreaming, which somehow makes it both better and worse. Better, because he can fully enjoy having dream sex with dream Rey without fearing, with the kind of intense distress only felt during sleep, swift retribution from her boyfriend. Worse, because of just about everything else.

He isn't even fucking her from behind, the only position that would make it an acceptable scenario. Nor is it on top of his desk, or with her leggings trapping her thighs together, or with her pink shoes still on.

In his dream, Rey is spread across the edge of his bed, naked and flushed and gorgeous. He kneels in front of her, his hands holding her thighs open, lapping at her warm, wet cunt. All of her is warm like that, all of her soft and pliant and sweet. Her hands are tangled in his hair, and she pulls harder every time he flickers his tongue in a way that particularly pleases her. She makes the most lovely little noises, whimpers and moans and breathy little exhalations that sound like his name: Ben, Ben, Ben, _please_.

In his dream, she tastes exactly like oranges.

He wakes up when dream Rey comes on his mouth, her voice raw and rough as she cries out her release. Ben jerks into consciousness with all the reluctance of a man being torn from heaven, the sheets across his waist damp and sticky. He heaves in huge gulps of air, pushing himself onto his elbows, and groans loud enough he almost worries his neighbor will hear him.

The worst part of it isn’t even that he hasn’t had a wet dream since he was in college, though that is a deeply humiliating reminder of how truly, wildly out of control he feels.

The worst part is that he knows he can’t ignore it any longer; that, apparently, it isn’t going to go away by itself.

Because, due to overwhelming evidence that has been steadily piling up like so many layers of snow, and against all logic and reason and rationality, and in direct spite of his own personal feelings on the matter, Ben is finally forced to admit the truth to himself: he wants to have sex with Rey.

“ _God fucking damn it_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Unfortunately, I want to have sex with you. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Ex9gyOmp0)


	6. ish

** 6\. ish**

Ben manages to get through a full two weeks without running into Rey, or even just hearing her name.

He would consider this an accomplishment, if it didn’t feel like the most pathetic victory in the world. As if it is such a triumph, avoiding her, as if it is this Herculean task he has been given, when in reality she’s just some woman he wants to screw.

He takes to reminding himself of several things over the course of those two weeks, to keep himself focused on all the reasons why any continued interactions with her are A Bad Idea:

1\. He is way older than her. A ten year age gap is too much, even just for fucking. Look at his parents: divorced, then remarried. A complete mess. Certainly nothing he would want to emulate. Does he really want to be his father? No.

2\. He is a professional. They work together. It would be weird to try to get with a woman he works with. He’s honestly surprised she hasn’t already made a complaint about him literally carrying her in the supply closet, and that's not even touching on the whole perfume thing that still makes him cringe every time he thinks about it. Does he really want to have a conversation with his mother about respecting women’s boundaries after trying to make a move? No.

3\. She has a boyfriend. A serious boyfriend, who he also works with, and who, he has to admit, seems to be a decent enough person, if irritating for reasons he can't quite identify. Is he really the kind of man who would try to steal someone’s girlfriend? No.

(Although, he reasons before he can really stop himself, she isn’t anyone’s property, and if she wanted to cheat on her boyfriend with him that would be shitty, yes, but also her choice, and Ben may be better than he used to be, morality-wise, but he’s not a fucking _saint_.)

4\. He has been attracted to people before, and it has never worked out in his favor. In fact, it always seems to end up pretty damn poorly. Is this really that different from the other times he has wanted to have sex with a particular person? No.

Except that, he already knows, it is.

Fuck.

His streak breaks the week of Halloween, during a conversation with his mother in her office. Leia wants, she tells him, to revisit his caseload before the next round of IEP meetings, since it’ll likely result in a few schedule changes.

What makes it worse is that Ben is the one who brings Rey up, and entirely without prompting. 

“And Kyle.” His mother is surrounded by papers, her hands searching quickly through a thick stack of folders to find his. “He'll be needing updated goals. He met most of his from last year, correct?” She doesn’t even wait for Ben to confirm before going on, “You already did his classroom observation, right?” Ben opens his mouth, about to say yes, when she continues again without looking up, “So you’ve already created new goals for this year and you’ve gone over them with Amilyn, right? You’re ready for the meeting next week, yes? Are you—”

“Mom,” he bursts out, and Leia startles, finally glancing up from her paperwork to his face. He takes a deep breath, reaching for the last lingering remnants of his patience. Sometimes, he has no idea why he ever agreed to work with family. God knows they have a hard enough time communicating even without work involved. He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Yes, I have done everything.”

Leia takes off her glasses and sets them on the table, her mouth slanted in restrained amusement. “Benji—”

He winces. “Please, don’t, you know I hate that—”

“Benji, Benji, Benji,” she murmurs, her voice wry. “I’m proud of you for being so on top of everything.” He rolls his eyes, but that doesn’t stop her. Oh, no, nothing short of a bulldozer could stop his mother. She cocks her head, considering him. “Is there anything else you want to check on before his meeting? Anything that might impact him for the year that’s not already in there?”

The words spill out of his mouth before he can stop them, like an wildly waving fire hose. “Actually, I wanted to observe him in his art class.”

His entire brain revolts the moment he says it. Ben’s voice keeps going, though, almost entirely independent of his actual thoughts, which are mostly _no! Stop! Why are you doing this!_ “He’s made a really strong connection with the new art teacher, and I think it’d be helpful to get a better sense of how she’s working with him outside of his regular classroom.” _Stop this right now!_ “I can set up a pre-observation interview and get a feel for what she thinks about his progress. I think it’d be helpful to have her perspective.”

 _What is wrong with you?_ part of him hisses, while another, much louder part screams, _I don’t know!_

Before he can immediately take back everything and admit it was all part of an elaborate prank, his mother nods.

“It sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought,” she says, making a note of it in minute handwriting on the pad in front of her. “Go ahead and set it up.”

Ben nods mutely, his jaw clenching tight. He can feel the beginnings of a stress headache pounding behind his eyelids. He wants to take a cue from the preschoolers and lay the fuck down for an hour or so.

Leia smiles without teeth, a twinkle of something in her eye that he does not like at all, no sir, he does not like that look. It’s the same look she used to get when she was about to shove him into the deep end of the pool at home, still fully clothed and already pissed to be out of his bedroom. A look of: _you will hate this so much, but I think it’s hilarious anyway_. “Let me know what you think,” she says, the subject of the sentence so ambiguous that it feels a little like the open end of a trap.

Rey is not happy with him.

She has never been happy with him, but she is particularly displeased after he emails her. Displeased enough that she sends back a single word to his request for a date and time that will best work for him to observe Kyle in her room.

_WHY?_

The word is repeated the minute she walks into his office after the end of the school day, her voice pitched at a shout.

Ben jumps at the slam of the door, his hands automatically clutching the edges of his laptop, as if she is Snoke, as if she is about to cross the room and grab his computer from his hands and throw it with an unexpected force onto the ground—an event that occurred a nonzero number of times (four times, it happened four times). He relaxes a moment later when he registers who it actually is, and then immediately tenses up again when she stalks up to his desk and plants her hands on top of it, leaning across to glare more deliberately at him.

“Why,” she says again, this time in a soft hiss, the words threaded through with rage, “are _you_ observing me?”

“I’m not,” he says, purposefully technical. “I’m observing Kyle.”

“Don’t be obtuse.”

He balks, offended. “I’m being nothing of the sort.”

“Why,” she snaps, “are you doing this after we agreed to stay out of each other’s way? I was supposed to be rid of you already.”

Ben pauses, searching the livid expression on her terrible, pretty face. Her hair is up in that row of buns again, the ones that infuriated him so much when they met. He wants to tear her hair down and rip his fingers through the strands. Her outfit is worse—a loose-fitting dress-looking thing with white leggings underneath it, form-fitting and splattered with purple and red paint. _Who wears white to a children’s art class?_ There are multiple specks of glitter on her cheeks, one gold flake just above the corner of her lip. He has to tear his eyes away from it before he can focus enough to speak.

He wants to eat her _alive_.

“Because,” he says slowly, “I would like your opinion on how Kyle is doing socially and emotionally in a context beyond his regular classroom environment.” He does not smile at the fact that he managed an articulate sentence. That would only make him feel lamer than he already does.

Rey, for whatever reason, doesn’t buy it. She straightens up, folds her arms, and narrows her eyes.“Come off it—you want to make me squirm.”

 _Not like that_ , he almost says, but he bites down on the words before he can say them aloud. “Believe it or not, Ms. Jackson, but not everything is about you.”

“Then _why_ do you have to observe me? Why can’t I just fill out a form?”

“I’m not observing you. I am observing—”

“Kyle, yeah, _so you say_.”

“It’s twenty minutes,” he reassures her as calmly as he can. Which is to say: not very. “I won’t need to stay for the full period, and what you do doesn't pertain to what I'm going to be looking at. Kyle is used to people observing him, so he shouldn’t be too different from his usual self.”

“And I’m just supposed to teach with _you_ in my classroom?” Her tone, already so angry, now drips with disdain. It makes him want to fucking _lose it_. “Standing there, leering? Terrifying small children and passing forest animals?”

“Yes,” he hisses, getting to his feet so he can meet her eyes directly. He doesn’t like having to tilt his head up to look at her, feeling at a distinct disadvantage. He wonders if that is what regular-sized people go through every day. “You are 'just supposed to teach' even with someone else there. That is your _job_. And,” he adds, his voice just barely edged with mockery, “if you’re as good as you claim, it shouldn’t be an issue, correct?”

Rey clenches her jaw; Ben can almost hear her teeth grinding. He realizes, abruptly, that the door to his office is shut. That they are separated by a distance so easily closed. That there is a flat surface between them that is looking more and more alluring by the moment. That he feels, with every passing breath, nearer and nearer to an all-consuming madness that will make him do something that is truly, horrifically terrible.

“Come on the 6th,” she says eventually, and it jolts him out of his momentary lapse of sanity and back into reality. The reality where he hates her and she would never fuck him, even if he were the last man on earth. And he wouldn’t fuck her either, because he hates her. So _whatever_. “His class comes in at 8:30 and stays until 9:15. If you say so much as a word to me, I will—”

“I can imagine the rest, thank you.” He clears his throat and sits back down; as he does, it seems to startle something in Rey, too, and she takes a small step back from the edge of his desk. Her face is flushed the color of ripe raspberries, her lips pink and parted and ridiculously tempting. Ben glances back to his computer, trying to remember what, exactly, he was doing before she barged in. “I will need to conduct a pre-observation interview with you,” he continues. “Anytime before then will work.”

She squares her shoulders, not looking at him when she says, “Come at 8:15 then. I’d rather not have you lurking around my hallway any longer than necessary.”

Ben frowns, dropping his eyes back to his laptop and setting about ignoring her completely as she walks back to the door. He types a line of gibberish onto the end of his open word doc to give his hands something to do. “Fine. 8:15 on the 6th. I’m looking forward to seeing if you live up to your own hype.”

She's already halfway out when she tosses back, over her shoulder, “Oh, I bet you are.”

She's gone before he can edge in the last word. It feels distinctly un-fucking-fair.

November 6th is his birthday. A fact that he neglected to mention to Rey, but a fact nonetheless. Everyone he has ever told, especially if they are millennials like him, somehow always makes it their personal business to make some unasked for remark along the lines of, _oh, of_ course _you’re a Scorpio_. Once, after seeing his driver’s license when he ordered drinks on a first date, a woman actually left the restaurant rather than continue talking to him. Which, fine, he didn’t really care that much, and it’s not like the date was going well, but still. A bit of a sting, there.

On the 6th, he prays throughout his morning commute that his mother actually listens to his request from the previous year, and does not announce the date of his birth via the intercom, or surprise him with a cake in the upper school faculty lounge, or use any other nefarious method of proving to everyone in the building that he is as human as they are, with a body that did not spring fully formed from the earth.

He goes to Rey's classroom first thing. It's easy to find now, which is like a grain of sand in his god damn eye, the simple idea of him knowing exactly how to find her hallway. It speaks to how much time he has spent there recently. Ben has one student in the lower school, and he worked at Alliance for years without knowing much beyond how to find Kyle's classroom. He should not suddenly know where everything in that wing of the building is.

When he opens the door, it's to the sight of Rey fluttering between the tables, setting up watercolors and brushes and crisp, ivory paper in front of each chair. She glances up at him, an expression of studied indifference written across her features, before she furrows her brow and continues with her work.

“We're reading _Ish_ ,” she says evenly, unprompted, “at the start of class. Then we'll be doing watercolors. We've been talking a lot about Van Gogh recently, a little bit of Monet and Turner. Lots of artists who embrace imperfection. Some of the third and fourth graders have been getting really frustrated with the tougher mediums because it's harder to make their pieces turn out the way they imagined, so right now we're letting go of trying to make everything look exactly like it's supposed to.”

Ben blinks, staring at her. There are a lot of questions swirling around in his head, with most of them almost entirely overwhelmed by a terribly inappropriate fixation on the embroidered flowers and fruits she has stitched into the back pockets of her jeans—little strawberries and daisies and peaches and tulips. Every time she bends over one of the lowered tables, it takes him a good five seconds to remember why he is even in the room. The loudest question, outside of wondering if she hand-stitched the embroidery and an upsettingly strong desire to know what she's wearing underneath, is what the fuck _Ish_ is. He settles on saying, “Kyle can be very particular. How has he been doing with letting go?”

She shrugs, crouching to clean up some water that spilled out of the painted baby food jars she has acting as water cups. “Not too badly, shockingly enough,” she says from down on the floor, her gaze trained on her task. “I always say the same kind of thing when he gets worked up: that I don't want it to look like mine, and that it just has to look like his. He takes a lot of what I say to heart, it seems like.”

Ben smirks slightly. “He has a crush on you.”

She snorts, standing back up and wiping her hands on the front of her apron. This one is covered in happy-looking bees and pots of honey. Not for the first time, he wonders where she gets those cloyingly adorable aprons from. Her earrings are bees, too, big, fat, fuzzy bees. Kitschy, he thinks. All of her is kitschy and cute and sweet. _Gross_. “Yes,” she agrees mildly. “But don't worry, he likes one of the girls at his table. Talulah.” Ben resists the urge to scoff out loud, but Rey doesn't remotely acknowledge how ridiculous the name is. “He told her he liked her Moana costume on Halloween.”

“That's good to know. A lot of what I'm looking for is how he interacts with his peers.”

She hesitates at this, seeming to think hard about it. “It's been—difficult. Amilyn has a strong hold on her class, and for the most part there aren't many problems, since he hasn't really had any big fits since his first day in here. But these kids aren't at an age where they forgive and forget as easily as they might have before, and they remember a lot about how he was last year. There are times where they're reluctant to sit near him, or sometimes one of them might blame him for something he hasn't done because they think I'll believe them. Because he's the _bad kid_.” She crooks her fingers in quotations on the last two words, rolling her eyes, and Ben feels a sudden rush of appreciation for her that he quickly stamps out. It's clear they both have a soft spot for Kyle, but that doesn't mean they are anywhere near on the same page about anything else.

He makes a note on his pad, flickering his eyes back up to her after he does. “What do you do when that happens?”

“I give a lot of praise when they're helpful or kind to Kyle, or just to each other, really. I mostly encourage him—and the kids who hear it—to ignore when someone isn't so kind.” She pauses, as if turning this statement over and over in her mind. Ben can do nothing but look, watch the way she bites the corner of her lip, the way her index finger strokes along the curve of her thumb. He feels like he could watch her for hours; it's not a good feeling. “All any of these kids want is attention, at the end of the day,” she goes on thoughtfully, “and they'll get it any way they think will work best. Kyle's method is usually to throw a tantrum, others it might be to tattle; I had a kid once who used to demand a compliment every time I praised anyone else. Like: you like my shoes, too, right, Ms. Jackson? A lot of kids, even at this age, don't really know the difference between good and bad attention yet. All they care about is that it's attention.” She shrugs, coming out of her reverie as she meets his eyes again. “The tricky part is getting them used to wanting positive attention, and showing them I won't give it to them if they're being hurtful.”

Ben nods as he writes, trying to keep his voice as bloodless and even as possible when he begrudgingly compliments her. “You seem like you have a good handle on it then.”

If she notices his patent discomfort, she doesn't show it. “I've honed it over time. I've been working with children in some capacity since I was about...fourteen, maybe? Aftercare teacher since I was eighteen, so. It's been a few years.”

“I guess I'll see it in action then.”

“But not really.” Ben glances up again, and any trace of thoughtfulness or peace is gone from her face, her annoyance at his very presence returned in full force. “Because you're not observing me, just Kyle.”

He sneers, knitting his eyebrows together. “Well, you'll be in the room. I won't plug my ears and close my eyes every time you speak.”

Rey bristles, crossing her arms defensively. “I wish you would.”

“You and me both,” he shoots back.

They're both quiet for a minute while Rey finishes setting up her activity. Ben stares at his notes, studiously avoiding watching her. He has more questions written down that he wants to ask her, but he doesn't much feel like hearing that stupid, accented, melodic voice anymore.

It doesn't matter; he hears it anyway as the students start lining up outside the door. “So, Mr. Solo,” she says suddenly, and he glances up. Her mouth twists meanly, her head cocked in mocking innocence. “How does it feel to be one year closer to death?”

Ben furrows his brow, his mouth opening in surprise, but Rey has already turned away to open the door and let the third graders flood inside before he can emit so much as a single syllable.

He hates it.

He can't respect her as a teacher. He just _can't_. Respecting her professional capabilities can only make it harder for him to hate her, and hating her is the only thing that can keep him sane enough to leave her the fuck alone.

And he hates her. He really, really hates her.

There is nothing that would give him greater pleasure than to see Rey Jackson fail, spectacularly, at the one thing she has claimed to be good at. If she was terrible, there is the possibility that it could make his out-of-nowhere, deeply upsetting attraction to her completely vanish. And the only thing worse than wanting to fuck his young, accented, gorgeous coworker is wanting to fuck his young, accented, gorgeous, and _competent_ coworker.

But—god damn her—she is actually _good_.

A natural, really. It's apparent from the minute the kids are on her carpet, from the moment she opens up _Ish_ —which is, apparently, a book—and starts to read. They are immediately transfixed, and Ben, Jesus fucking help him, can see exactly why.

Because from the moment she turns it on, slips into her teaching persona, she is entirely transformed. She is bubbly and serious, excited and kind, animated and joyful. Her entire being seems to change as she works the room, her expressions elastic and vibrant, her voice shifting gently from dramatic gasps of surprise to soft whispers that sound like secrets, making each child lean in closer to her to soak in every single word. As they work on their watercolors, she flits from table to table, happily engaging with her students as they work, listening intently to each of their answers and responding thoughtfully. She has an entire discussion with a group of girls that seems to revolve almost exclusively around the song some creature named Olaf sings in some Disney movie, and she is unsettlingly knowledgeable throughout every single turn of the conversation.

She doesn't look at Ben, where he sits by the classroom's sink, taking occasional notes about Kyle's peer-to-peer interactions, even once.

When she goes to Kyle, it's clear that he just adores her, his eyes lighting up in happiness when she kneels by his table to talk to him about his piece. Ben can tell it's out of genuine affection that he behaves in class, rather than anything in particular she does as management. She rules the room less like the other educators he's seen and more like Glinda the fucking good witch: a benevolent, beautiful creature of loveliness, surrounded by ridiculous little munchkins who would do anything to please her just because of how god damn magical she is.

Though she isn't perfect; Ben comforts himself with this. There are a few moments where she seems slightly lost, like she's wracking her brain for the right solution when a kid stumps her with a question, or when one of them acts a little too wacky in the midst of their excitement. She's rushing to finish her lesson at the end of the class period, and her transitions in and out of the room and between activities could definitely use some work. But, even then, Ben only knows this because he stays for the whole class period, even though he told himself he wouldn't. Because, every time he tells himself he is going to, he finds that he can't leave.

Because he, too, is transfixed.

And he can't fucking _stand_ it.

He figures out how she knew about his birthday when he gets back to his office, nearly a half hour after he told himself he'd leave her room. There is a card waiting for him on his desk with tiny, scrawled well wishes from everyone in the building.

He doesn’t search for Rey’s name; he would attest to that fact with a Bible under his hand. He sees her note anyway, written in small, crushed letters hidden between well wishes from an impossible number of people, only a quarter of whom he could identify. It's a simple enough message: _Happy birthday._ And then, her name underneath, with no sign off of _sincerely_ or _best wishes_ or a tiny cartoon heart to precede it: _Rey_. No last name. Like she knows he'll know exactly who it is, even using a name he's never called her.

She used a marker to sign the card.

It makes him smile, despite himself, an expression that he instantly transforms into a scowl of vague distaste.

He barely gets anything done for the rest of the day, but that, he thinks, is probably because of something entirely unrelated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Oh, baby. Oh, man. You're making me crazy. You're really driving me mad. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R3B2Xr8kwQ)


	7. sam and dave dig a hole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> setting things up!! setting things up!! this will be a slower burn than even i initially anticipated. we shall see how it goes >:^)

** 7\. sam and dave dig a hole**

His parents drag him out to dinner that Saturday, partly as a birthday celebration, but mostly to hassle him about calling both of them more often.

“You are my employee,” his mother says over a plate of ravioli, “and somehow I still have a hard time getting you to share a meal with me. Even for your birthday.”

Ben does not roll his eyes, as it would only end up as more fodder for his mother’s martyr complex. The only thing they enjoy more than having him actually go to dinner with them is complaining about how he never gets dinner with them.

But it’s not like they can blame him. He still resents it, though he knows, rationally, as an adult, that he shouldn’t. Still resents the years of his childhood spent in a broken home, with parents who got back together only once he was out of the house and going to grad school. Parents who split because of him, and got back together only once he was no longer their problem—the literal worst nightmare of most children.

It stings, even after all this time, that he was the reason they got divorced. But the only thing worse than still being hurt is his parents knowing he’s still hurt. So instead of rolling his eyes at his mother, he smiles tightly and nods once, then goes back to his steak.

Leia doesn’t particularly need his response to continue the conversation anyway. “Thirty-three,” she announces. “A good age. Not a kid anymore.”

“I was thirty-three when I got married to your mother,” Han adds, gesturing to his wife. “Thirty-four when we had you.”

Oh. Great. Ben was wondering when they’d bring up grandkids.

“Clock’s ticking, Benji,” his mother adds. “You’re running out of time to start a family.”

He takes a vicious bite of his dinner, silently bemoaning how dry the steak is. “Jesus died when he was thirty-three. Running out of time to do that too.”

Han smiles that charming smile that makes people do whatever he wants. “Come on, kid,” he needles, “don’t you think it would be nice? At least a little? House, kids, the works?”

“I’m perfectly happy without a dozen screaming brats tearing through my life, thank you.”

“Your girlfriend won’t be,” his father replies, the words muttered into his whisky like it’s a secret between men, as if Leia isn’t right next to him. She reacts exactly how Han wanted her to, twisting her mouth and swatting him in the shoulder. Han just smirks at his wife, and Ben does actually roll his eyes at that. His parents. Flirting. _Ugh_. “You better start thinking about having at least one of those screaming brats.”

“Good thing I don’t have a girlfriend then,” Ben says blithely. And it is a good thing. He doesn’t need the hassle. He says as much to his parents, and they do nothing but glance at each other meaningfully, the way they did when he was a kid and there was a slightly-too-adult joke in whatever movie they put in the VCR.

Ben takes a drink of his martini to give himself something to do, the twist of lime sliding around the rim to his mouth as he lifts it to his lips, and he thinks, suddenly, of Rey eating a kiwi whole. He furrows his brow down at his glass as he sets it back on the table. Funny. It doesn’t even taste like kiwi. He wonders what brought that terrible memory to mind.

“Maybe this’ll be your year,” his father is saying, nodding seriously as he thinks about it. “Yeah, I think this is gonna be your year. I was just telling Luke—” Ben’s hand curls automatically into a fist under the tablecloth, “when he comes for Thanksgiving he’ll have to bring a nice gal to set you up with.”

Ben blinks, looking up from his plate to meet his mother’s eyes. She, god damn her, is already looking away, her gaze fixed on the space behind his ear as if there is an utterly fascinating circus performance going on just behind him. “Luke is coming to Thanksgiving?” he chokes out. “But you said—it was a _joke_ —”

“Ben,” Leia says, finally glancing back at him. She reaches her hand across the table to rest on his forearm, and Ben pulls his arm back, feeling distinctly like a teenager. Like he did when she tried to comfort him after he was expelled, with his nose bloody and knuckles torn to shreds. He didn’t want comfort then; he certainly doesn’t want it now. “Luke is going to be in town around that time anyway, and he wanted to come. He wanted to see you. And I thought, it’s been so long, and he’s my brother, and I want us to have a real family Thanksgiving for once.”

Ben scoffs, shifting in his chair. He hates this restaurant. He hates how overdone the steak is, and how weak the drinks are, and he hates that his parents decided they were going here without once asking him if he wanted to go anywhere else. He wishes he were anywhere else. He can feel his anger, comforting and familiar, ready for him to pull out from just under his skin. Anger, for him, is easy; anger was always the easiest thing. “We have never had a real family Thanksgiving, Mom. Not once.”

Leia straightens up, glaring. “That’s not true, and you know it. I know you’re upset, but that is no excuse to be rude.”

“It’s not rude, it’s accurate. It’s never just _us_ , you _always_ have to prove how generous you are and invite fucking _anyone_ just so you don’t have to be alone with your disappointment of a son. You don’t even want me there—”

“Kid,” Han interrupts, his voice a warning. “Cool it.”

Ben ignores that, leaning in closer to hiss, “Who is it this year? What passing strays are coming to the house?”

Leia purses her lips, and Ben almost smiles. Of course. Of _course_ she invited people from Alliance. He knows it before she opens her mouth. “There are a couple of teachers in the lower school who won’t be going home for the holiday,” she says, “and I invited them to dinner. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you there. _Of course_ I want you there.”

Ben is—livid. Shaking. He wants to be a child again, to make a scene and embarrass them both. He wants to go to a different restaurant. He wants to send his food back to the kitchen and kick up a big fuss.

He wants—he wants both of them to just _look_ at him.

He keeps his voice low and quiet, making sure his mother can hear every word as he says, “When have we ever been a _real family_?”

Han claps his hands together, startling Ben into leaning back. “Okay,” he says, his voice a proclamation, “we are moving on from this now. We are all going to Thanksgiving in a few weeks, and we are all having a nice dinner now, and you, son, are going to apologize to your mother.”

Ben is silent for a moment, trembling with anger. As he watches, his mother’s face softens, just barely.

“Ben.” Leia shifts closer to him, reaching out again, her palm face up on the table. Beseeching. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I want you there. If you want, I can tell them—”

Ben feels a sudden rush of shame, feels a flush creeping along his cheeks. Slowly, he lifts his hand, stretching it across the table, and brushes his fingers against hers. “No, I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I shouldn’t have overreacted. You don’t have to—uninvite anybody. It’s—I’m fine.”

They are just quiet for the moment, the three of them, until the waiter passes by and asks, entirely unaware of the minute-long crisis that they collectively avoided, if Han is done with his pasta.

He needs to stop sitting with Poe at staff meetings. Ben should probably stop talking to him altogether, but as it is: they’re men. In education. In their early thirties. Who else is he going to talk to? Certainly not Hux.

But, as it is. He needs to stop sitting with Poe at staff meetings, because sitting with Poe at staff meetings means he gets a front row seat to Rey Jackson and her stupidly nice and handsome boyfriend, and Ben really doesn’t care for the show of them joking and laughing and just having the best time ever. He doesn’t need a reminder of Rey’s existence, or of his attraction to her, or of the reason (well, not _the_ reason, one of many reasons) why he will never get to fuck her.

Not that he really cares about it, he corrects himself. Fucking her. Because bad idea, for all of the other reasons not currently physically present. The reasons from his list, which he repeats like a mantra in his head while she sits next to him (and why does she always have to sit next to him, why does she have to use that soap that makes her smell so damn tantalizing, why does he have to look at the curve of her neck every time he turns his head, why why _why_?): there’s a ten year age difference, they work together, she has a boyfriend, and she’s not that fucking special anyway.

He barely even notices when the staff meeting ends, and it’s only because Poe nudges him in the shoulder to let him know he’s the last person still sitting down.

Ben stands up, stretching out all the cramps that developed in his legs as they atrophied at the miniature table.

“You’re coming tonight, right?” Poe says as he gets to his feet, and Ben pauses, turning to stare blankly at the other man.

“To what?”

Poe rolls his eyes, heaving out a sigh. “I knew you’d forget. I knew it.”

“Look, I don’t have the energy to play the guess what I forgot game, so just go ahead and tell me.”

“It’s Paige’s birthday. You remember Paige—my wife, Rose’s sister, big as a fucking house?”

Ben furrows his brow, slinging his leather messenger bag over his shoulder as they start walking out of the cafeteria. “To be honest, sometimes I forget you’re married.”

“You were literally a groomsman at my wedding, but that’s beside the point. You said you’d come.”

“I don’t—” He pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I had a very long week.”

“Too bad. Paige is expecting you, and you’re coming. I’ll text you the address.” Poe nudges him in the shoulder, all jocular and irritating. “Bring your dancing shoes, because she’s insisting we go to a club.”

Ben groans, but it only serves to make Poe smile more smugly as he shoves open one of the double doors. The bastard. “How is she planning on dancing at seven months pregnant?”

“Where there is a will, my sister will find a way,” Rose interrupts. She’s standing by the doors to the lunchroom with Finn and Rey, and she grins as the two men stop dead in their tracks at her words, albeit for entirely different reasons. Poe, because he wants to go talk to them; Ben, because the sight of Rey makes every thought in his brain leave in a hurry.

 _Ten years_ , he thinks, almost desperately. Ten years, coworkers, she has a boyfriend, she’s not fucking special.

Poe laughs, striding up to the small huddle while Ben hangs back, watching with horror. _Don’t invite her. Please don’t invite her._ “What are you hooligans looking at? I don’t want to have to confiscate your cellular devices.”

Ben walks closer to them, step by agonizing step, while Rey holds her phone up so Poe can see what, exactly, the hooligans are looking at. Poe lifts it out of her hand to look, his smile growing wider. “Oh, cool. What is this?”

“Just pictures of my senior show.” There is a clear note of pride in Rey’s voice when she answers, her eyes bright as she takes in Poe’s expression of impressed delight. She smiles wider at the _oohs_ and _ahhs_ her three audience members let out as Poe slides through the photos.

Ben raises his eyes to the ceiling; he should have known someone like her would be the type to fish for compliments. It’s a gimme, showing off her art from college. Of course it’ll give her the approval she so clearly craves. She must not be very good, or maybe not very confident, or both, if she’s begging for praise.

“Solo,” Rose calls, looking up at him, “you have to see this.”

Rey’s smile falters when she catches his eye. It feels like a knife in his gut. Ten years, he reminds himself, work, boyfriend, not special. “No, it’s really—it’s nothing.”

“She’s amazing,” Finn gushes, throwing an arm around Rey’s shoulder and shaking her while she giggles. Ever the perfect boyfriend. Ben clenches the strap of his bag tighter, his teeth grinding, and he’s not jealous. He just dislikes public displays of affection. He’s _not_ jealous. “She’s just being modest.”

Poe slips the phone out of Rey’s hand altogether, and she squeaks, an adorable little protest of a sound, reaching out to grab it back even as Poe shoves it into Ben’s chest. Ben covers it with his palm automatically, but otherwise doesn’t look at it. “Don’t be humble, Jackson, it’s not a good look on you.”

“Poe,” she mutters, visibly annoyed, “you can’t just hand my phone to whoever you feel like.”

“It’s not to whoever I feel like. I just think our friend Ben needs to see this.”

“Yeah, he should see it,” Rose adds gently. Always trying to be nice, that one. “He’ll like it!” Rose grins wider as her eyes flicker to Finn, her shoulders sloping in his direction. Ben feels a little sorry for her, the way she’s so obviously enamored with the guy. That, he thinks, will give her nothing but heartbreak. 

Ben stares at Rey, her phone still pressed against his chest. He won’t look at it unless she wants him to. His mother raised him to know that at least.

He holds it out to her, the screen facing down, and Rey huffs out a sigh, folding her arms. “Go ahead,” she says, begrudging, as if she resents the very fact of his existence on the earth.

Ben raises his eyebrows, waiting, his arm staying outstretched.

“I said, go ahead,” she snaps after a moment. “I’m sure I won’t know a minute of peace unless I hear your _opinion_.”

She says _opinion_ like the word is spelled with four letters. If anyone else in the circle notices her open hostility, they certainly don’t show it.

“Your funeral,” he mutters. He forces a shrug, finally lifting her cell closer so he can take a look at the photos he simply _must_ see.

The moment he takes it in, registers what the photograph shows him, he immediately regrets it.

Because it is—she is very— _good_. Talented. Skilled.

Rey Jackson, it seems, just lives to prove him wrong.

He doesn’t quite know what he thought her focus was in art, but he certainly wouldn't have guessed it was sculpture. Definitely not working with what appears to be junk—mostly car parts and scrap metal. The photo Poe insisted he needed to see shows her standing next to what must be the centerpiece of her senior show: two figures that tower over her, their heads tilted together, each of their hands clasped as if in prayer. Ben can see the smallest details of where she etched their faces into the metal, the rivets of fingernails on their hands. As if it was as easy for her to shape as butter.

It is...incredible, for lack of a better word. It shows an extreme level of skill and mastery of her chosen media. It is beautiful and sweet and sad, in the earnestness of her expression in the photo, in the position chosen for the two figures, standing over her like proud parents, the parents who must be some kind of disappointment to her, based on the one time she mentioned them to him.

And Ben—can’t speak. Can’t breathe. He thinks: _years—work—boyfriend—special_.

He blinks once, and then twice, before finally handing the phone back to Rey. “It’s pretty good,” he chokes out finally, and he knows the moment he says it that it was the wrong thing to say.

“Oh, come on,” Finn groans in mocking frustration. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“No, it’s—it’s nice.” Ben clears his throat, wracking his brain for something that will sound good, sound right. Articulate and knowledgeable and worthy of being said. Worthy for him to say to her. He can feel his heart pressing on his ribs like a wild animal throwing itself against the walls of its cage, and he hates this. He hates how talented she is, and how good at her job, and how lovely, and how pretty, and how now he is being forced to acknowledge all of this aloud, with witnesses present. It makes him dislike her even more than he did before. He searches, and says the first thing he can think of that might make him sound like he knows enough about art to fully appreciate what she’s done. “It’s kind of reminiscent of John Chamberlain, right?”

There. That’s good. Chamberlain is a reference she will be sure to appreciate, being another sculptor who works with scrap metal. Ben even sounds like he knows something about art. He has been to several events at the LACMA, after all; he knows the names Marcel Duchamp, and Mark Rothko, and everything.

But the comment doesn’t go over as well as he pictured. Rey’s face first falls, then hardens completely, like ice freezing over a cold lake. Like a magic trick: how to make happy, nice Rey disappear. “Reminiscent, huh? You mean derivative.”

His heart still beating wildly, Ben races to backtrack. “No, I—that’s not what I said.” Her expression grows even angrier, and he rushes to correct, “ _Meant_. That’s not what I meant.”

Finn and Rose glare at him, while Poe seems utterly enraptured by this turn of events. Rey just jerks her mouth into a facsimile of a smirk, shoving her phone back into her purse. “Whatever. I should have known that you wouldn’t get it.”

He knits his eyebrows together, his mouth turning down and harsh. “ _That I wouldn’t get it_ , what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I just mean that you wouldn’t appreciate art when you see it because all you really care about is the name and the price tag.” She sneers, her eyes rolling over his body, lingering on the shining black leather of his bag, his Rolex, his tie. Ben should probably feel guilty about those, all of the expensive things she’s silently shaming him for. He doesn’t; he just likes her looking at him. “Just another heartless barrister with a lot of money and no taste.”

The worst thing—the _worst_ thing about it is this: Ben actually takes the time to remember what Rey said about this exact thing that morning he spent in her classroom. That some kids don’t care about the difference between good attention and bad attention. All they care about, she said, is that they’re getting _something_.

The worst thing is: he is entirely aware that that is all he’s doing when he speaks next. Just looking for more of all of that attention she’s giving him.

“You know what,” he says, his voice pitched deadly quiet, “you’re right.” She lifts her head, the beginning of a satisfied smile turning up the corners of her mouth, right up until he continues with, “I _did_ mean derivative.”

She straightens up, looking mad enough to spit in his eye. Ben nearly smiles as she opens her mouth to let him fucking have it, which is right when Finn finally steps in.

“So, Rose,” he pipes up, voice overloud, subtly positioning himself between his girlfriend and Ben as he steps closer to the other woman, “tell us about this party your sister is having.”

Ben can practically feel the color drain out of his face at the words. He knows, suddenly, that it’s too late, and Rose already invited them. Sweet, nice Rose, with her stupid crush, has just ruined his night.

And now, he is going to be stuck in the same room as Rey for the duration of a birthday party he doesn’t even want to go to.

He meets Poe’s eyes, feeling the way his entire being shivers with something like panic, but Poe does nothing but give Ben a shit-eating grin.

“This is going to be so great,” he says happily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Maybe, baby, you act like a star. You did not do anything; who did you think you are? ](https://youtu.be/Y5RbOC5xkD4)


	8. giraffes can't dance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a long chapter, but i did not want to split it into two parts, so here it is!! it is highly unlikely any other updates will be this long
> 
> this story is very silly but i like it so there

** 8\. giraffes can’t dance**

Ben does not _go out_.

Going out requires a desire to want to do things like have a one-night stand, or drink to excess, or have a so-called “good time.” None of which he particularly wants at any given moment; certainly not now, on a Friday night, after an already long week, in a club that is less of a club and more of a bar with an empty space that will, ostensibly, be used as a dance floor, where currently some unbearably ironic people in the 18 to 25 demographic stand, swaying, with Pabst Blue Ribbons and gin and tonics clutched in their well-manicured fingers, to the dulcet sounds of electronic indie songs that Ben has never, not once in his life, heard.

It’s early, and he knows the bar will only get more and more crowded as the night goes on. He has no idea why a visibly pregnant woman would choose to spend her birthday here, but, then again, Paige is not a typical pregnant woman. She is, according to Poe, and based on Ben’s own firsthand experiences talking to her, utterly terrifying, and not about to let something like being pregnant with her first child stop her from living her life.

He will stay for one drink, he decides as he looks out over the bar. He will stay until he finishes his one drink, and he will be back on the road by 10. Asleep by 10:30. Like the grownup he is.

The minute Poe catches sight of Ben across the room, he hollers out a greeting, gesturing to the five or six tables they are using for Paige’s party. The woman of the hour is in the center of it all, as big as Poe’s aforementioned house and wearing what appears to be some kind of sophisticated pregnancy jumpsuit. Paige is beaming, chattering excitedly with her guests while Rose piles more and more presents on a teetering stack. 

Ben looks down at the slim envelope he brought as a last minute present. A gift card to Nordstrom will be fine, he’s sure.

His eyes shift across the tables, flick back and forth, and he feels, vaguely, like he is searching for—for _something_ —

“Boo!”

Ben jumps, settling down when he hears the telltale laugh of someone who thinks their juvenile prank is just _hilarious_. He turns, registering Finn grinning widely, Rey standing just behind his elbow.

“Solo,” he says. “I’m shocked you actually showed.”

“So am I,” Ben replies shortly.

Finn is quiet for a moment, that grin still fixed on his face, as if he is trying frantically to keep the moment from getting too awkward. It’s irritating to Ben, when people can’t let silence just be silence, when they constantly try to force everyone to respond. After a moment, Finn says, “Any idea why Rose's sister wanted to have her birthday in a bar when she's—you know.” He mimes a baby bump, and Ben hears Rey's overjoyed laugh, though he doesn't glance at her to see it happen.

Ben nods curtly. “She likes to go dancing every year for her birthday.” He glances around, where he can see maybe three people dancing in the middle of the floor, each of them worse than the last. He cringes. “I guess this place gets a little busier later on.”

“Oh, it will if we have anything to do with it,” Finn says. He nudges Rey in the side, using the hand not holding onto a gift bag to pull her closer at the shoulder. Rey accepts the touch easily, stumbling into him, smiling, and Ben can't help it then. He looks at her, just for a moment.

But just the moment is enough to ruin his night. If not his entire life.

She is—gorgeous. Impossibly beautiful. Unavoidably, insanely hot.

Most of the times he's seen her, Rey has been haphazardly attractive, donned in apparel that seems better suited on the children she teaches than on her. Now, though, she's wearing a pale blue dress that clings to every curve (one spaghetti strap falling off her tanned shoulder, and thank God for winter in southern California) with a hemline that rides up to the middle of her thighs to show off her slim, toned legs that seem to stretch on for miles and miles and end in strappy black heels, oh, Jesus Christ, _heels_ , not those horrible orthopedic nightmare shoes she usually clomps around in. She isn’t wearing tacky jewelry, she isn’t splattered in paint and glitter, and she isn’t covering her tits with an apron. And, speaking of, holy fuck, her _tits_ —small and perfectly-sized to fit in his hands. Or his mouth, he’s not picky. Like she was made for him.

Her hair is still up, in one bun instead of three, and her lips are red. _So_ red. He wants to come on her mouth, _in_ her mouth. He wants to turn and leave the bar. He wants to _die_.

Ben takes one glance, and immediately chokes on nothing. He coughs for a minute, while Finn pats his back and asks loudly if he's okay, until Ben nods, still red-faced and wheezing. He recovers eventually, well enough to gesture that they go join the party without him.

Finn shrugs and walks over to Poe and Paige, Rey following closely behind.

Ben is...lost. Stranded. Out in space. All of his senses narrowed down to her and the way she devastates him entirely on accident.

He goes to the bar and orders a whisky. He tells the bartender, after a moment of thought, to make it a double.

This, Ben decides as he downs the glass, hissing at the burn as the liquid slides down his throat, will be _fine_.

It is not fine.

Most of the party attendees are Paige's friends, doctors and nurses from the dermatology clinic where she works. The only people Ben knows are Poe, Rose, Finn, and Rey, and he finds himself at the same table as them out of a simple desire to be around familiar faces.

Which, of course, is why he finds himself sitting at a booth next to Rey, clutching a glass of whisky like it's the only thing standing between him and complete madness. He fixes his eyes at a point straight ahead and decides he won't look down at her legs. He will not let his gaze drop (and it's such a short distance, she's _right there_ , right there and perfect and so, _so_ fuckable), and he will not turn his head. He will sit and nod in distant agreement throughout every turn of the conversation that goes on around him, and then he will go home and jack off shamefully to let out some frustration.

He's in the middle of wondering how and why, exactly, she always seems to end up sitting next to him instead of her literal boyfriend, when he hears something that sounds like a question ending in his name and startles back into awareness.

“Sorry,” he says, leaning closer to the head of the booth to hear Poe over the music, “I didn't catch that.”

“Your worst run-in with a parent outside of school,” Poe repeats. “We're trying to beat Rose.”

Ben looks at her, faintly worried for the answer when he asks, “What was Rose's?”

“Middle-aged father of one of my juniors in a lingerie store,” Rose supplies, shuddering as she speaks. “He said my 'fella' would be sure to appreciate my purchase. In almost those exact words. It was _awful_.”

“So what was yours, man?” Finn asks.

Ben doesn't have to think long. “I ran into Kyle's mom at the gym. She hit on me. It was right after her divorce, so I think it was just practice for her, honestly. Trying to make sure she hadn't lost it.”

Rose gasps in horrified delight, while Rey does nothing but shrug. “Getting hit on by dads was pretty much par for the course at my old school,” Rey mutters into her drink.

Rose and Poe laugh at her words and move on, distracted by Finn launching into a long-winded story about his worst run-in.

Ben doesn't move on. “What?” He turns to look at her, feeling suddenly, absurdly— _concerned_. Of all things. How strange. “The dads really hit on you?”

Rey lets out a short, sharp bark of laughter, not facing him when she responds, “Oh, are you surprised to hear that men are gross?”

“No,” he says. “You just—you should've, I don't know. Told someone.”

“Told who? And say what, exactly? Tell the principal that Julia's dad followed me to my car but didn't actually do anything but ask if I had a man?” She scoffs. “She had other shit to worry about.”

Ben shrugs. “Still.”

Rey actually turns her head to him at that, her eyes ablaze. “Don't act like you give a shit,” she snarks.

His mouth tilts down, and he glances back straight ahead to glare at nothing. “Fine. I won't.”

“Mine was in a liquor store,” Rey says a bit louder, now addressing the table at large as the other conversation lulls. “One of the moms saw me buying some wine to take to a party and got all huffy about me purchasing alcohol.”

“Jesus,” Poe says, laughing, “ _really_?”

Rey sips delicately at her drink, something with a thin slice of nectarine on the rim as a garnish. She lifts the slice to her lips and bites down, juice trickling down her lower lip. Ben grips his glass tighter, taking a long pull. “This is when I was with the kindergarteners,” she says. “Some families seem to be under the impression that because I work with their child, this means I am also a child. And then they're shocked and appalled to realize I can drink or smoke or swear or fuck just like they do.”

Nope, he thinks, _nope_ —he's not going to think about Rey fucking. Disaster ahead, that way.

“I've gotten that before,” Finn agrees. “Some people think I should act like a kid just because I teach first grade.”

“Right? They get so offended when they realize I'm an adult. I swear, no one respects primary school teachers as real professionals—”

Ben rolls his eyes at the self-righteous turn the conversation has taken. “Maybe if you didn't dress like a child they wouldn't treat you like one,” he says snidely.

Rey instantly stops her tirade, looking at him with murder in her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Come on,” he groans, gesturing to her as he speaks. “The cutesy aprons, the costume jewelry, your god damn _hair_ —you're practically begging people to not take you seriously.”

“At least I have a sense of style. Your clothing seems to toggle exclusively between needlessly expensive and ruthlessly normcore.”

“She's got you there,” Rose says, nodding and pointing. “That is Solo to a T.”

“Listen, I'm a male feminist—”

“ _Ugh_.”

“Shut your stupid face, Dameron—”

“But, I have to say,” Poe continues over Rose and Rey's loud, fake retching, “I kind of agree with Ben. I started at Alliance when I was twenty-seven, and no one listened to anything I had to say until I started wearing a tie to work. It's the curse of the young professional; if you want respect, you have to look the part.”

“I like the way I dress,” Rey says, stubborn as a mule. “My kids like the way I dress.”

“Of course they do,” Ben says, his voice way too heated considering the subject at hand. “They like Disney. You come to school looking like a fucking Snow White, of course they'll like it.”

“Kids this age don't know _Snow White_ anymore,” Finn corrects automatically. “It's all _Moana_ and _Frozen_ now.”

Ben blinks, the interruption suddenly forgotten as he asks, “What are those?”

“Hell yeah,” Poe shouts, the sound enough to draw the attention of multiple other booths as he slams his hand on the table. “I was hoping we could work in a round of What Has Ben Heard Of.”

Rose squeals in excitement, clapping her hands together. “Yay! I love What Has Ben Heard Of!”

“Wait, wait, wait—” Finn interrupts, shaking his head in confusion. "What is this _amazing_ sounding game?”

“Rose and I discovered a few years ago that Ben has an extremely intriguing information processing center that prevents him from retaining any information he doesn't deem important enough to remember later.”

“Basically,” Rose adds, “there's shit he's heard of that you would never in a million years expect him to know, but if you ask him about shit everyone knows, he looks at you like you're insane for bringing it up.”

“For example: Ben, what is Let It Go?”

He sighs heavily. “No idea.”

“Perfect,” Poe says. “Now, who is the singer this bar is playing right now?”

Ben strains his ears to listen, trying to tune out the ambient noise of the bar as it fills slowly with more and more people. “It's Billie Eilish,” he says, after a minute. “I'm pretty sure.”

Finn stares, open-mouthed. “That is...incredible.”

Rey furrows her brow, seeming vaguely irritated by the demonstration. “How do you know who Billie Eilish is and not know Let It Go?”

“I work with teenagers,” Ben says evenly. “And Let It Go is some kind of child...book?”

“Song,” she says flatly.

“Whatever.”

“Do you just live out in a cave somewhere?”

“No.”

“He doesn't have social media,” Rose says around her straw, and Rey huffs out an angry burst of laughter.

“God,” she says, “you're _so_ annoying.”

What Has Ben Heard Of is a game oft-repeated, and oft-laughed over, and oft-fucking-infuriating to him. Ben keeps his face even and neutral as he answers a variety of questions with varying levels of inanity with a clipped yes or no, as is the custom. He is not allowed to defend knowing or not knowing anything, per the statute of Poe's bachelor party, though all present are free to speculate on how and/or why he has or has not heard of any given subject.

Forty-five minutes in, Finn ends up with a working list divided into two obvious columns.

What Ben Has Not Heard Of: _Moana_ , _Frozen_ , _Trolls_ (the movie), the concept of toxic masculinity, most streaming services beyond Netflix, the phrase “Netflix and chill,” the fashion movement described as “witchy,” Amal Clooney, and _Stranger Things_.

What Ben Has Heard Of: Kidz Bop, trolls (the doll), Lizzo, _Harry Potter_ , every _Lord of the Rings_ , the vsco girl movement, the entire collected works of Gloria Steinem, the concept of a meme, Quentin Tarantino's foot fetish, Amal Alamuddin, and _Twilight_.

Ben has never liked the game, for obvious reasons, but, inexplicably, each time one of his responses makes Rey burst out into a fit of confused laughter, and each time she gets into an extended commentary on her theories about his unpredictable memory, he feels slightly more relaxed.

He is, he thinks, finally doing what his dad always begged him to, and what he was never all that great at: being a good sport.

It’s past 11 o’clock when Ben realizes he should have already gone back to his apartment. He also, he reflects, should not have had another double. He’s not drunk, by any means, buzzed at the very most, but he can tell the alcohol is starting to affect his decision-making skills. Not that his were ever so stellar to begin with.

Starting with this, now: standing on the edge of a makeshift dance floor packed with bodies, each of them writhing and shaking with a dizzying lack of awareness and coordination to music that seems like it would work better on an alt-rock radio station than as something to, quote unquote, “get down to.”

He has no idea where anybody is; after he handed off his present to Paige and ate a bite of her overly sweet chocolate cake, he found the rest of the booth where they had been sitting empty. For about fifteen minutes, he makes uncomfortable small talk with one of Paige’s dermatologist friends, a woman around his age who, under different circumstances, would probably be his type. However, under the current circumstances (i.e., outrageously distracted by a different, out-of-his-fucking-reach woman), he cuts the conversation short and heads off to make his exit.

It's on the way, that he spots Rose and Finn dancing together. They are...close to each other, he thinks. Really close. Way too close. And part of him, the slightly more inebriated, reckless, and stupid part of him, wants to go over and cause a scene and stir some shit up, but—it’s not his business, he reminds himself. If Rey wants to be with someone who flirts so blatantly and so obviously with another woman, that’s her prerogative. It’s not, he is glad to say, his fucking problem.

He sees Rey only a few seconds after he passes the other two by, dancing alone on the edge of the crowd. His gaze is drawn to her as if by force; he only needs to let his eyes linger on her for a moment before he’s frozen to his feet. _Ensnared_ is the word for it; as trapped in the sight of her as a moth to the flicker of a flame, and it is just as bad for him.

It isn’t even because of anything she’s doing in particular. If anything, her dancing is distinctly un-enticing. She dances, quite literally, like no one is watching: eyes closed, arms waving wildly, jumping around on her feet back and forth, side to side, all of it coming together to create an effect best described as _wacky_. But it is so...she is just _so_...

Much. Too much. Enough to make him feel drunker than he should, enough to make him stand still and forget entirely what he was doing passing by the dance floor in the first place.

He is distantly aware of the fact that he has been standing and looking at her for a length of time beginning to verge on creepy, when Rey opens her eyes and meets his gaze.

His instinct is to drop his eyes, mumble an apology, and kill himself out of sheer embarrassment, but even as he looks at her, she doesn't stop any of the strange shimmying that could be mistaken for dancing. Instead, she glares back at him, and says across the distance between them, “Stop staring.”

Ben jerks his head like it might help him clear up the fog that's descended into his brain. “What?”

“You’re staring. Stop it.”

He clears his throat, taking a step toward her so he can lower his voice a little. “I wasn’t—I’m not staring.”

“You are. You are staring.”

“I—” He hesitates then, trying to conjure up some kind of excuse for his blatant staring. He can't find one; he lets the unfinished sentence dangle in the air between them like Wile E. Coyote about to fall off the edge of a cliff.

Rey stops her movements, bracing her hands on her hips. “What is wrong with my dancing?” she bursts out after an overlong moment.

He blinks. “Excuse me?”

“You are watching and judging my amazing dance moves, so what’s the problem? What is so wrong with the way I dance?”

Relief floods through him at her words, at her apparent ignorance to the more obvious reason why a man would stop to look at her. He clears his throat, letting his voice back to a more casual register, though it does sound slightly strained to his own ears. “Well, for one thing, you are doing way too much arm work.”

She shakes her head. “There is no thing as too much arm work.”

“There is. You’ve found it. And somehow, you have managed to commit to a rhythm that misses every single beat.”

She seems actually offended at that one. “I have not. I am very on beat.”

“You aren’t,” he says flatly.

“Oh, like you could do better, Mr. Stand-By-Myself-Too-Cool-For-School.”

“Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.”

“You’re just embarrassed of how you dance.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.”

She glares at him, his acquiescence to her insults seeming only to annoy her further. “Well, how am I _supposed_ to dance?”

Any reply, he knows, is dangerous. Anything he says could be taken the wrong way and make her hate him even more. If it looks like a trap, after all.

He figures, what-the-fuck-ever.

“Getting on the right beat would be a big help,” he says, and she frowns.

“I don't need your _constructive criticism_ —”

“You’re the one who asked what was wrong with your dancing,” he points out. “I’m just answering.”

As Rey pauses, Ben realizes how batshit crazy he is acting. It’s insane, he thinks, that they are standing here, discussing this, like it's perfectly reasonable for coworkers to dissect dancing styles. It's insane that he said anything. What’s even crazier is that she seems to actually listen to him, standing still and focused for a moment while she tried to hear the rhythm of the song blaring from the speakers. When she finds it, she starts up again, the same energetic jolt of her limbs as before, albeit slightly more in sync with the music.

“Your elbows,” he adds after another moment, wincing. “Maybe do less of a chicken dance kind of thing.” She follows that suggestion, too, tucking her arms closer to her side while she sways her hips. Without the distraction of her upper body flailing around, she is actually not too terrible.

As she shimmies in a half circle, throwing in ridiculous little moves here and there, Ben realizes she’s actually kind of terrifyingly attractive. Standing there, his hands in his pockets, sleeves rolled up to his elbow and tie loose around his throat—he can pretend she’s dancing for his enjoyment, rather than as yet another way to prove something. Like she wants him to watch her. Like she's trying to provoke him into doing something he really, really shouldn't. “That’s good,” he says absently, his eyes drifting along the length of her body. He swallows hard. “That’s—yeah. Good.”

“Perfect,” Rey announces, immediately stopping her progress and folding her arms over her chest, hip cocked to the side. “Now it’s your turn.”

He snaps back into reality. “What?” he croaks, and, _shit_ , he should have known she was trying to trick him into something.

“You just think you’re so clever,” she says lowly. “If you think you’re so qualified to teach, why don’t you show me how it’s done?”

“You don’t want that,” he says, reluctance threaded into the words.

“Oh, I _really_ do.”

Ben pauses, considering her. Her fucking funeral, he thinks. “Fine,” he says, and strides toward her.

Rey’s eyes, at first so fiery and confident in her anger, grow wider and rounder as he approaches. Her lips, the red gloss faded to an attractive crimson stain, part, and they're _obscene_ , the things he could do with that pretty mouth of hers.

She’s frozen like that, rooted to her spot, right up until the moment he reaches out to put his hands around her waist.

Rey startles back, narrowly avoiding tripping into a couple making out behind her. “What are you doing?” she sputters.

“Dancing,” he says, as if that’s the only explanation needed.

“I didn’t mean with _me_.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” he says, “I’d rather not look for a partner in this crowd if I can help it.”

“Why do you even need a partner?”

“Look, when women dance by themselves, it’s sexy. When men do it, it’s sad. Besides, what better way is there for you to judge my abilities than to dance with me?”

She scoffs. “I’m not doing that.”

There is no real reason he has for wanting to dance with Rey. Really, it’s just another in a long line of stupid decisions when it comes to her, and definitely not a good way to get over his hatred of her, or try to build any kind of positive working relationship. And truthfully, he doesn’t really expect her to relent. It would be easy to let it drop, hang his head in defeat, and move on. But something in him won’t let him walk away, and it would be such an easy thing to goad her into it.

So he goads her into it.

Ben tilts his head close to her ear, careful not to touch her. Even from a foot away, he can feel how tense she is, her body rigid. Neither of them moving. “I get it,” he says in a voice all low and soft. “It’s fine if you’re too scared.”

For a woman who seems to pride herself on how much better she is than him, she’s surprisingly susceptible to pointed taunting. Rey frowns, glares at him, and puts her arms out straight in front of her like a zombie, landing them on his shoulders with a thunk.

She’s not drunk. He’s pretty sure she’s not drunk. She only had the one, after all, and she doesn’t seem to be stumbling or slurring her words. Her face is flushed and her eyes are bright, but that’s probably just due to throwing her body around like one of those giant inflatable people car dealerships put out when they have a sale. Which begs the question of why she's giving him so much ground.

It’s his turn to ask, “What are you doing?”

She lifts her eyes to the ceiling, tilting her palms face up on his shoulders in exasperation. “Dancing.”

He snorts, derisive. “Not like that, we’re not. This isn’t high school, we don’t need to leave room for Jesus.”

“You Americans talk about Jesus a lot. Is he really that big of a deal here?”

He looks at her steadily. “Yes.”

Ben reaches up, sliding her hands on his shoulders to clasp together around the back of his neck. The movement brings Rey half a step closer to him, and she goes with barely any resistance. This close, he can see the smudged, faded wings of her eyeliner trailing up the side of her cheek, the strands of hair loose from her bun sticking, damp with sweat, to her temples, to the back of her neck. She looks slightly undone, undone and _tempting_.

He wants to undo her even more. He wants to tear at the seams of her until she’s nothing but a pile of blood and bones. She looks like a fairy tale fucking princess, or—even better—like Little Red Riding Hood, all young and sweet and innocent, her lips red, her eyes wide and swallowed into blackness—which, he guess, makes him the fucking big bad wolf, trying to gobble her up, desperate to consume every tender, secret part of her. Obsessed with all the red.

His hands might shake, only a little, when he tugs her closer, grasping the curve of her waist. She’s tall, taller in her heels, but she’s still a slip of a thing, still slight enough that he could lift her up easily ( _so_ easily), slide his hands under her ass and carry her to his car. No one would miss them. He could drive her back to his apartment, fuck her into his mattress, destroy her in all the most deliciously depraved ways, and no one would even miss them.

Her fingers curl in the collar of his shirt, crumpling the fabric, and he murmurs quietly, “You don’t have to keep your hands there. It’s just a suggestion.”

“I know that,” she snaps, but he can hear something trembling through her voice anyway. As if she is as affected by the proximity as he is.

Ben pauses for a long moment, flexing his fingers on her waist (he wants to wrap his hands around her stomach and meet his fingers together in the middle, he has the distinct feeling she would fit in the circle of his hands perfectly), when Rey jolts him back to her with, “Is this you admitting defeat? Because right now you’re not really convincing me you know what you’re doing here.”

He snorts, but still starts to move with her in a gentle rhythm. Just enough to situate himself. “I know what I’m doing.”

“All men are under that impression,” she says dismissively.

“I’m not all men.”

“No,” she agrees. “You’re even more of a fucking pain.”

“Language, Ms. Jackson.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, would you?” Her expression holds nothing but contempt for him, her brow furrowed, that red, red mouth open to bare her teeth as she spits, “I’m still waiting for you to prove you're ever worth the air I waste talking to you.”

The minute she says that, it’s like he blows a fucking fuse. Gone is every trace of attraction or desire; instead all he feels is blinding rage. Why does she always have to be so fucking _difficult_? Why does she always assume the worst of him?

He ignores every rational thought scrambling to make itself known then. Every thought of: _she hates you because you’ve been nothing but condescending and shitty, she couldn’t even take a compliment from you because she assumed it was back-handed, she hates you and she will never, ever change her mind_. Instead of listening to reason, instead of letting it go, like the child song suggests, letting the whole thing drop and walking away from a situation that will most assuredly leave him turned on and angry about it, Ben does the exact opposite.

He leans into it.

It only takes a second to slip his hand from her waist to the small of her back. His palm spans the width of her torso there, from pinky to thumb, and he suppresses a shudder at the fact of it. It’s only another moment for him to pull her closer, closer, closer than they’ve ever been—her body molded against his chest, her mouth inches away from his mouth. He slides a thigh between her bare legs, the hemline of her dress riding up. Just as quickly as he realized once again how much he hates her, he suddenly wants desperately to know the feeling of her thighs wrapped around his hips. The feeling of her cunt wrapped around his cock. The feeling of her lips opened into his, his tongue between her teeth—

He recognizes, with a start, that he’s never imagined that before. For all that he wants to fuck her, for all the sex dreams he's had (at this point, a nightly torment), for all the times he’s gotten off to the thought of her sucking his dick, he has never pictured the usual prelude to those kinds of activities.

A kiss.

Rey’s hands have moved, fluttered from his collar to press flat against his chest, and as he tugs her into his body, she makes the smallest sound. A soft gasp, a tiny little, “Oh,” of surprise.

It sounds so—unexpected. Involuntary and instinctive. Like she couldn’t help it.

He wants to eat the sound out of her mouth. He wants to hear it again. He wants to kiss her.

 _He wants to kiss her_.

Ben open his hands and steps away from her like she’s a lit match about to be dropped onto a puddle of gasoline. Like he might be burned to a crisp if he doesn’t get the hell away from her. Rey stares at him as he retreats, still open-mouthed, her breathing uneven and eyes wild.

“You win,” he chokes out, and, without another word, he turns on his heel to leave the bar before she can toss out so much as a farewell _fuck you_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ (I crawl, I crawl, an animal to you.) [...] I am dripping with sweat. My hands—I can’t hold anything in my hands. ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N4lI24uC4gQ)


	9. mind your manners, b.b. wolf

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did u guys see the new emma movie? if not go see it. anyway, the opening scene is (loosely) inspired by knightley throwing off his jacket and waistcoat after going to emma’s house and just fully laying down on the ground in muted agony
> 
> fun fact that is relevant to this chapter: my mom used to make me watch etiquette videos from the library. this is a real fact.
> 
> edit to include!!! i wrote rey POV fic set immediately after the events of the previous chapter!!!
> 
> [ read it now :))))) ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23707441)

** 9\. mind your manners, b.b. wolf**

He makes it back to his apartment from the party in record time, and the moment the door swings shut he’s scrambling to throw his keys and wallet onto his kitchen counter, fingers shaking as he tears open his tie and tosses it carelessly onto his leather sofa.

He thinks: fuck her. Fuck her. _Fuck_ her.

Ben lays down on the couch, gives up halfway through unbuttoning his shirt, and kicks off his shoes while he rushes to unbuckle his belt, pulling it through the loops of his pants with a snap.

“Fuck her,” he mutters to no one, dark and furious.

He reaches down to unzip his slacks and palms himself through his boxer-briefs. He’s half-hard already, but, then again, Ben is almost certain he’s been sporting a semi since the minute he saw her in that stupid dress. She probably got it from the clearance rack in Forever 21. Her lipstick is probably from Walgreen’s. His tie is Louis Vuitton, and his shoes are Yves Saint Laurent. She’s nothing to him. She’s nothing, _period_.

 _Fuck her_ , he thinks again, and then he pictures that, pictures fucking her, and his cock stiffens in his grip. He tugs slowly at first, screwing his eyes shut, swallowing around the dryness in his throat. He needs water. He drank too much. He’s probably drunk now. He doesn’t feel dizzy or light-headed, and he had no trouble driving home, but he must be drunk somehow anyway. If he’s not drunk, that means he is masturbating to the thought of a twenty-three year old coworker with a boyfriend not thirty minutes after a party, where he did nothing more that touch her back, while practically _sober_ , and that is a piece of information Ben does not much feel like copping to.

It was that stupid dress. Skintight, pale pastel, low-cut. He’s pretty sure she wasn’t wearing a bra. Why would she wear a dress like that to a party where she knew she’d see coworkers? Is she trying to _torture_ him?

Yeah, right. That’s it. She’s trying to torture him—how vain can he possibly be? She doesn’t even think about him.

He could make her think about him. He could—he should have kissed her then and there. He strokes faster, thinking about it. Imagines that he reached his other hand to the nape of her neck and tilted her head back. Imagines how he would lean forward to kiss her in the middle of that crowd, how he would slip his tongue into her mouth, tasting nectarine between her teeth, rucking the bottom of her dress up to her waist. No, they were in public; he’d get her to his car parked over on that side street a block away. He would wait until then, and then he’d bend her over the hood and drag the tight fabric of her dress over the curve of her ass.

He would make it good for her. Ben licks his palm and returns it to his cock, stroking a finger over the head to feel the pre-come already leaking out. He would make her come with his fingers first, feel her gush all over his hand, and then he could slip inside so easily, so quietly. He would hold a hand over her mouth so no one would hear her moans. She’d be loud. She wouldn’t be able to help it.

She would whimper his name into his palm, _Ben, Ben_ , and he would press his chest to her back and whisper that she was being so good, such a good girl for him, taking him so nicely. He’d lean forward and kiss—he flinches—no, wait, that’s not right. He can’t kiss her if she’s bent over his car.

He slows his strokes slightly, feeling almost drugged as he pictures flipping her over, hitching her knees around him, and hauling her against his chest so he can shove his tongue in her mouth. Ruthless. Vicious. He would be able to tug down the front of her dress that way, _yes_ , and pinch and play with her nipples until she squeals.

He wonders what she’ll sound like when she comes. If she will keen, high and drawn-out as he thrusts into her roughly; if she will cry out once and then go limp in his arms, her body welcoming him lovingly. Or maybe—or maybe it’ll be just like the sound she made when he pulled her close on the dance floor: quiet, shocked, and dangerously innocent. Like she didn’t expect to like it.

He would reduce her to a needy little mess of a thing, make her come until she can’t take anymore, make her beg for him, for his cock, until she forgets all about her boyfriend.

It would be perfect. She would love it, and she would want him so much, and—

“Rey,” he groans, the sound strangling in his throat.

He has to be drunk, he decides; this is unacceptable if he’s not drunk.

Its not stopping him though. His hand moves faster as he nears his release, and he lets out his breath, his voice shaping her name again. “Rey, fuck, _Rey_ —”

He finishes then, hips jerking as he comes over the bottom of his shirt, semen staining the blue a dark navy.

Ben opens his eyes after a long minute, breath struggling on its way out of his lungs, his head swimming, his cock still twitching from the force of his orgasm. He looks at the ceiling and says softly, to his empty apartment, “Shit.”

He runs into her every single day the week before Thanksgiving break. Like the universe is trying its damnedest to torment him, blaring in his head with every accidental moment of eye contact _REMEMBER HOW YOU DANCED IN A HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE MANNER WITH THIS WOMAN? REMEMBER HOW YOU GOT OFF TO THE THOUGHT OF FUCKING HER IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS AND ACTUALLY SAID HER NAME OUT LOUD LIKE A FUCKING FREAK? REMEMBER THAT, YOU DUMBASS?_

On Monday, he bumps into her outside the central admin office. They are walking past each other, both of them trying to get through the same door at the same time, and, before he knows it, Ben is forced to press himself back against the doorframe while she scoots by. He lifts his eyes upwards, trying not to flinch when her hip brushes against his front, begging a God he doesn’t believe in to keep him from getting an erection at work.

She doesn’t say a word to him as she gets by. When he looks back down at her, she is already walking into the office, greeting Kaydel with a voice all bubbly and happy.

The next two days, it’s in the parking lot. On Tuesday, she lifts her hand in a stiff, unfriendly wave as she emerges from her car, while Finn smiles brightly as he steps out of the passenger seat. Ben raises his hand in some approximation of a hello, but she turns around to walk into the school before she can see it. Wednesday, she doesn’t see him at all, too busy chatting with Finn to notice Ben jerking his head in a half-nod of greeting.

Ben immediately vows to stop saying hi to her.

Thursday is the worst one, if only because Ben doesn’t so much see her as walk bodily into her at the end of the third grade hallway in the lower school. They collide as they turn a corner, both of them walking perhaps just a mite too fast, and Rey makes a tiny sound of surprise as she slams into his chest and stumbles back. Ben reaches out to stabilize her, his entire being reacting in panic at the thought of making her fall.

He puts her to rights quickly, glad for the small mercy that nothing she was carrying dropped to the ground.

“I’m so sorry, I should have looked where I was—” She looks up then, and Ben can see the moment she registers who it is, whose hands are on her waist. Still. “Oh. It’s you.”

He drops his hands back down to his sides instantly. “It is.”

Rey narrows her eyes, her mouth opening and closing. “I need—I have a class.”

Ben lifts his hand as she sidesteps him and walks past him down the hallway he came from. “See you,” he says, but by that point she is too far away to hear him.

He stares at her ass until she disappears around the other corner, and he is vaguely distracted for the rest of the day, but that, he decides, is from excitement for the upcoming week off.

He tells himself he doesn’t care, and he reminds himself of his firm and unwavering hatred of her.

On Friday, the last day before break, the third and fourth graders go on a field trip. Ben remembers this only when he’s standing in front of Holdo’s door, staring through the rectangular window slat at an empty classroom.

He hears Rey before he sees her, the sound of her clogs thumping on the tile down the hallway perpendicular to his. Ben inhales, about to groan out his irritation and distress, her presence just the icing on a cake of frustration over his sudden schedule change and the fact of the time he wasted coming all the way to the lower school, when he stops, abruptly.

Because she is—singing. Quietly, under her breath, to herself. He can’t hear the words at first, but then he recognizes the melody suddenly, something by the Cocteau Twins that his dad used to play, always nostalgic for the seventies and eighties, a time before Ben was born. He can hear Rey’s voice going low and then rising up suddenly as she sings, _without, without, without a doubt_ , and it makes him smile, which, damn it, is right when she passes the hallway and meets his eye.

The grin leaves his face so fast it feels like she slapped it off of him.

Rey stops in her tracks, her voice cutting off in the middle of one of the _withouts_. Her cheeks flush a light pink, and she glances away at some point in the corner of the ceiling as if it is suddenly extremely fascinating, before announcing to the wall, “He’s at the zoo today.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I got that.” Ben looks at her, and it almost makes him smile again, the way she blushes, the way she bites her lip like he caught her in the middle of something altogether too private.

She nods, a sudden jerk of her head, and points forward, starting to walk. “Yeah, I’m gonna—yeah.”

Ben watches her take a few steps, and it’s strange, it’s very odd, and he has no idea why, but he doesn’t want—

He doesn’t want her to go just yet. He wants her to stay. Just for a moment.

“Shouldn’t you be with a class now?” he says, gently teasing. Not that he knows her schedule, necessarily. He just knows when her lunch is, because of the printer incident, and he knows when she has a free planning period because of the first time they met, so. So yeah, maybe he does know her schedule kind of. “Are you playing hooky, Ms. Jackson?”

She turns around slowly, her fingers curled into fists, a glint of irritation apparent in her eye even from a distance of a couple of yards. “I usually have one of the fourth grade classes now. They’re at the zoo, too.”

He winces. “No, I figured. I was. Joking.”

She deflates a bit, some of the fight leaving her. “Oh.”

She stands there for another moment, her arms held stiffly at her sides, before she points ahead again. “I’m gonna—”

Ben feels, very strongly, very absurdly, that he isn’t done yet. They’re not done. “I’ll walk with you,” he says, his voice a bit too high. He clears his throat, dropping it back to his usual register. “I’m going in that direction anyway.”

She tightens her jaw, glaring as he walks up to her. “Fine,” she says.

They fall into step together fairly quickly. Rey seems, sort of, like she is trying to outpace him by walking way faster. It does nothing, obviously; his legs are long enough that he can keep up with little trouble.

After a minute, she tires of it, slowing down as they reach the stairwell that will take her downstairs to the art room.

“So.” Her voice is sudden and loud in the stillness of the hallway. Ben looks at her as she tugs self-consciously on the back of her ponytail. “I was—”

She stops walking, and Ben automatically stops, too, facing her. He waits, watching as her expression struggles between nerves and annoyance and slight lingering embarrassment, as she seems to fight through something in her mind.

“I was thinking,” she says after a long moment, “that we should call a truce.”

He raises his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware that we were at war.”

She lifts her eyes to the ceiling, and he gets the distinct impression that if she could teleport him onto some remote, distant planet, she would. “Please. Be serious. I’m trying to—since we’ll have to spend Thanksgiving together, I thought we should—”

His brain screeches to a halt, making a sound inside it that sounds like a knife scraping wrong on a ceramic plate. “ _What_?”

Rey blinks at him, all doe-eyed. “Wh—what do you mean _what_?”

“You—” He pauses, his voice strangling. This is not happening. It’s not. He tries again, the words stilted as he manages, “You’re coming—to my—house?”

She blinks again. She looks like fucking Bambi, natural and awkward in her limbs and coltish. That word again, unbidden. He notices then, as if she’d planned the comparison, that she is wearing earrings shaped like deer. Cutesy. Fucking unbearable. “I just assumed you knew,” she is saying while he spirals. “Your mother didn’t tell you Finn and I are coming to dinner for Thanksgiving?”

He swallows, squeezing his eyes shut as he takes a steadying breath. One two three four five. One, two, three, four, five. _Use your words, honey, please_. “No,” he says eventually. “My mother didn’t see it fit to tell me who was going to be in my fucking house.”

She bristles. “Well, I guess she didn’t think it was your call, since it’s not really _your_ house, is it.”

He takes a sharp breath in, and it is—so humiliating. How much it hurts, this off-handed comment. It feels like a punch in the gut, this truth she hurled at his face like a rock.

He says, before he can stop himself, “Congratulations, Jackson. That was cold.”

Her face falls instantly, one arm coming up to grip her other elbow. “I didn’t mean—”

Ben lowers his eyes, reaching his hand for the knob to open the door to the stairwell. Rey just stands there, staring at him, while he opens it wide.

“What are you doing?” she asks quietly.

He glares at her shoulder. “You’re going to your room, right?”

From his periphery, he sees her shake her head. “No, I meant—why did you open the door for me?”

He glances up at her and sees there isn’t a trace of irony in her features. He lets the door swing shut when it becomes clear she won’t be stepping through it anytime soon. “Why wouldn’t I?” he says simply.

Rey does nothing but stare at him, as if she is seeing him for the first time. “I’m sorry,” she bursts out. “That was—mean and uncalled for, and I want us to be okay with each other, you know? Since we’ll be having dinner together, and your parents were so nice at my senior show, and your mother has been so kind to give me this job and invite me into her home, and I just—we don’t have to be friends, but I’d like for us to be okay with each other.”

He eyes her warily, trying to figure out how sincere she’s being. “Alright,” he says, the word slow and drawn out.

She lets out her breath in a rush, like she’d been holding it in. “Alright,” she says.

“Is that how you met them?” He cocks his head and cracks his neck, letting out a small grunt of relief when it actually manages to release some of the tension that has been building up throughout their conversation. “My parents?”

Rey is silent for a moment, looking at him almost slack-jawed. She screws her eyes shut and pops them open again, her voice a bit too high and breathless when she says, “Yeah, it was—your mom was in Ann Arbor to give a guest lecture? I think? And your dad was wandering the campus and saw the senior showcase. He asked me about some of my pieces.”

The corners of his mouth edge up in spite of himself. “He likes cars.” Ben should know: Han still insists on driving that piece of shit Falcon whenever he goes out. “He talked your ear off, huh?”

She lets out a small puff of laughter almost involuntarily, genuine laughter, and it makes something in his chest feel tight and warm. “Yeah, pretty much. And your mom came by when she was finished up and we got to talking...I told her about being an aftercare teacher, and she said she was the headmistress for this school called Alliance. She called me up a few weeks later and said the art teacher was retiring, and would I like to come to California to interview for the position. I was really—I was just really lucky to meet them.”

The tone in her voice is what makes him say it. The look in her eyes: so admiring and adoring. Like they are just so _wonderful_. _How could such wonderful, intelligent, beautiful people create such an awful, stupid, ugly child?_

He already knows she’s thinking it; he’s heard it so many times before.

Ben drops his eyes, shrugging. “They can be really charming when it suits them.” If he sounds just a little bit bitter, so what. “When you can do enough to hold their attention.”

She furrows her brow, and she doesn’t even have to speak for him to know he has somehow, once again, pissed her off. “The way you talk about your parents is—” She stops herself then, looking like it is taking her a massive amount of effort to hold her tongue. She says, “Whatever.”

His voice is low when he says, “No, tell me.”

She straightens her back, squaring her shoulders. Says, steely, “A lot of people would give anything to have parents who cared about them as much as yours do about you.”

Ben takes a step closer to her, close enough that she has to tilt her chin up to maintain eye contact. And of course she does. She holds his gaze steadily, bold and challenging. “Believe me when I say this, Ms. Jackson,” he says softly. “They would have disappointed you.”

Her breathing is erratic, her chest heaving with barely contained anger. Ben doesn’t really care; this is something she should hear.

“Your perspective is duly noted, Mr. Solo,” she says, gritting her teeth as she turns her head, showing off her lovely, long neck. Ben stares stupidly, most of his thoughts fleeing from his head. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

It’s because they both try to reach for the doorknob. Ben isn’t even trying to be cruel or kind or anything in between. It’s instinct, leftover from the years he spent as a child sitting alone in front of the TV, while his mother made him watch etiquette videos from the library to teach him how to be less rude. Less aggressive. Less...himself.

Rey is just a little bit faster as she reaches, and her hand, thin and delicate and dainty, closes around the doorknob first. Ben’s hand, large and wide and oafish as an oven mitt, closes around hers.

She jumps instantaneously, pulling her hand away so fast he could almost feel offended. He opens the door, his eyes taking in the blush that has returned to her freckled cheeks, the pink color of her mouth, the bright blackness of her hazel eyes. Which, weird. Why are her eyes so dark even with all the lights of the hallway shining over them?

Maybe she’s high on legal, recreational marijuana. He almost laughs aloud at the idea.

“Thank you,” she mutters, interrupting his ridiculous train of thought. She briefly meets his eyes before she walks through the door and down the stairs, her ponytail bouncing as she goes.

Ben lets the heavy door swing shut with a click, his stomach curdling with the first stirrings of dread. She will be in his house. Will see the trampoline out back where he broke his arm. Will see the frankly humiliating childhood photographs his mother has scattered everywhere, where his hair is too short and his ears are too big and he was not even close to growing into his nose or his mouth—not that he really has even now.

She will be in the vicinity of the room where he discovered the wonder of masturbation.

God help him.

Ben turns back down the hallway to retrace his steps all the way back to the upper school, cursing himself under his breath for walking the entirely wrong direction with her in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ You got a reaction. You got a reaction, didn’t you? ](https://youtu.be/WmCNf7P7YTA)


	10. my dad thinks he's funny

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanksgiving was supposed to be one chapter, but i had TOO MUCH TO WRITE and i am, at my core, extremely impatient, and now it will be two chapters. get ready, fellas.
> 
> i have an extended spring break for the next few weeks, so i may or may not update more frequently than usual. i may write some oneshots in my free time. who knows! everyone stay safe out there :^)

** 10\. my dad thinks he's funny**

His mother tells him to arrive at four in the afternoon, so naturally he shows up at the house at a quarter to five. Rey and Finn are already there when he pulls up to the curb, perhaps stopping just a little too quickly. He knows they are there because he can see her shabby car sitting in the driveway, parked right behind his dad's old Falcon. He also knows this because Rey and his dad are standing together by the beat up old junker when Ben pulls up, Han's eyes wide and hands thrown around his head as he tells what Ben assumes is one of his interminable, half-made up stories.

It's probably the one about how he and Chewbacca successfully outpaced a police cruiser in it. Han can never resist telling that one, showing off.

Ben squeezes his eyes shut for a moment and takes a deep, steadying breath, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. He kind of regrets agreeing to come to this. There was a time, when he was living in the city, working at the firm, that he stopped going home altogether. He wishes he were still that selfish.

He sits for another moment, prays he will be able to make it through the night without a wholesale slaughter, and opens the door.

“So there we are—” He can hear his dad from across the expanse of the yard, that's how loud and embarrassing he's being, “—me, Chewie, baby Ben strapped in the backseat, four cops tailing us, and the entire trunk full of—”

“Dad,” he finally calls out, wincing as Rey's grin falls off her face when she looks up at him. Ben crosses the drive to his father and Rey, keeping his eyes fixed on Han when he says, “I know we've passed the statute of limitations on most of your criminal activity, but that doesn't mean you should go around bragging about it to anyone who'll listen.”

“I quite liked hearing about it actually,” Rey says stubbornly, folding her arms across her chest. Ben glances at her, taking in a thin black sweater, dark leggings that hug the curves of her legs. No silly jewelry, her hair piled in something that looks like a pretty bird’s nest on top of her head. He swallows, his eyes flickering back to his father, back to safer terrain.

He thinks he likes her in black.

“He never gets the details right anyway,” Ben says, hoping it sounds cool and calm and mean. “It was _one_ police cruiser.”

“It was four,” Han protests.

Ben frowns. “That is a lie.”

“So.” Rey leans back, letting her eyes dip over him in an exaggerated once over, like he is a truant student of hers she’s caught faking sick. “Looks like you finally decided to show.”

Ben decides to play along, looking back at her to raise his eyebrows. “I did.”

“Late, of course. But that seems to be something of a pattern with you.”

“It isn't. You just seem to bring out the worst in me, Jackson.” He presses a hand to his heart, his smile mocking, and she digs her fingernails into the creases of her elbows, like she’d like to close them up into cute little fists and whack him.

Not that she’d be effective in any way. It’d be, he’s sure, like being attacked by a bunny rabbit.

“And with so little effort on my part,” she spits out, obvious anger coming through in her voice. He wonders, not for the first time, how she can possibly hate him so much that she can’t even help showing it in front of other people, even his own father. “It’s important to be timely. Keeping people waiting is very rude.”

He cocks his head, considering her in front of him. “Would you believe I got stuck in traffic?”

“No.”

“What if it was the weather?”

She thinks on this. “You do seem like someone who would recoil at the barest glimpse of sunlight on your skin.”

“The sun I can stand, but I’ve never liked the Birds of Paradise much.”

Rey furrows her brow, confused, as she looks around herself like there’s something she’s missing. “I don't see any birds.”

Ben almost laughs, a huff of air rushing out of his parted lips as he grins. He points behind her, and Rey turns, following the line of his finger. “No, it's—the flowers by the window. Birds of Paradise.”

She blushes, seeming slightly abashed. “Oh.”

“Welcome to California. There's a lemon tree out back too, and an orange tree. It’s all very cliched here.”

“Your mother already showed them,” Han says, and Ben startles, his eyes shifting back to look at his father. Like, somehow, he had forgotten entirely that he and Rey aren’t alone, standing on the gravel driveway to his childhood home, surrounded by the scent of citrus and freshly cut grass and Birds of Paradise. “Finn’s used to it, of course,” Han goes on, “but Rey here looked like her eyes were about to pop out.”

“Fruit trees aren’t a common thing where I’m from,” Rey says, her attention turned back to Han, ignoring Ben completely. “Least of all ones that sprout up right in your backyard.”

Ben blinks, feeling strangely off-center. “Right.”

A sudden silence descends on the three of them, during which Ben can hear the distant shouts of kids playing on the front lawn of a neighbor's house. “Rey, sweetheart,” Han says, interrupting the quiet, “could you refresh my memory? How old are you exactly?” Han flickers his eyes to Ben’s face, smirking slightly, and Ben feels dread and irritation drop together in the pit of his stomach.

Thirty-three. Twenty-three. _Of course_. Of course that’s where his father’s mind went.

Rey, still oblivious to the underlying meaning her answer to the question will have for his father, says simply, “Twenty-three.”

Han’s smirk stretches, growing into a shit-eating grin. Ben wants to punch something. Maybe his father’s smug face. “Ah. Okay. Interesting.”

Rey’s eyes narrow, sliding between Ben and his father in a way that practically screams suspicion. Ben can only hope that she doesn’t know enough about his family to be able to figure out why she should be suspicious. “So, I'm,” she starts, then pauses, nodding decisively as she stumbles through the rest of her words. “I'm gonna go find Finn. So. Yeah, I'm gonna. Bye.”

Han nods, smiling kindly, while Rey all but runs away from them. Ben watches her leave, reminding himself it’s definitely not appropriate to be staring at her ass as she hops up the front steps, especially with his father standing right there.

Ben clears his throat, rolling his head on his neck as he turns to Han. “When is—” He stops, letting out a small sigh, “ _Luke_ getting here?”

His dad looks at him steadily. “He'll be by in time for dinner. Around 6 o'clock.” He adds, almost as an afterthought, “He's not bringing a set-up for you, in case you were worried about that.”

A small puff of disdainful laughter leaves his mouth. “I wasn't.”

Han's voice is too casual when he mutters, “Looks like he might not have to, anyway, huh, kid?”

Ben lifts his eyes to the blue, cloudless sky. He sighs deeper than before, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Dad. I know what you're thinking, and don't. Just—don't.”

Han shrugs, palms out and open, feigning innocence. The bastard. “Don't what? I didn't say anything.”

“I'm not interested in any of that,” Ben says, as tonelessly as he can.

“I believe you.”

“I'm particularly not interested in her,” he continues, hoping his voice sounds more convincing aloud than it does in his head.

Han smirks again. Arrogant motherfucker. “You sound very sure of yourself,” he says flatly.

Ben drops his hand so he can glare at his father without anything in the way. “ _Dad_.”

“Alright, alright. I'll drop it.” Han claps Ben on the shoulder, tugging him closer and shaking him the way he used to when Ben was still a child, before he dramatically outgrew both of his parents and, along with them, most forms of physical affection. “Let's go inside. I think I've put off helping your mother for long enough.”

His parents insist on taking their guests on a tour of the house. Ben goes along reluctantly, and mostly to act as a barrier—a physical one if need be—between the entire group and his childhood bedroom. Finn and Rey stand together, perfect audience members for his parents' braggadocio and long-winded storytelling about every single room. Most of the stories involve Ben, though none are too humiliating, fortunately. Things like his penchant for sliding down the bannister along the staircase, tormenting his mother with laughter while she barked at him to be more careful, him practicing basketball with the barebones hoop behind the back porch, him practicing calligraphy alone in his room (that one is slightly embarrassing, and Finn guffaws as Leia recounts the love poem he wrote Jenny L. in the fifth grade with it; Rey doesn't laugh with him, merely smiles in a completely mystifying way and listens to the rest of Leia's monologue).

The house isn't a big one, necessarily—just large enough for a family of three, really—but the expression on Rey's face as she looks around makes it seem like she's never been in a home so beautiful as his.

He's always known he lived in the lap of luxury as a child; he's not so spoiled as to think everyone can afford a decently-sized house just outside of Los Angeles, along with all the nice things his mother and father filled it with. It's not his money, or even his mother's money, or even his mother's mother's money. There is no reason to be proud of it—it just is what it is. But seeing Rey's open wonder and amazement as she steps through each room makes him feel slightly dumb for thinking that way. For taking it so entirely for granted, as a birthright, as something guaranteed to him.

But then again, when he has kids, he'll want them to feel that way, too, at least a little bit: assured of safety, shelter, and protection, the way he was. Assured that they will be allowed to have at least some of the things they want.

Ben shakes his head suddenly, in the middle of his mother droning on about the Frank Lloyd Wright inspired stained glass windows in the upstairs hallway.

 _When_ he has kids?

“You alright?” Rey asks quietly, cutting him off in the middle of his line of thinking.

Ben nods, his eyebrows knit together. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “Headache.”

She shrugs, turning her focus back to his parents, and Ben can't help but feel off for the rest of the tour of the house.

Fucking weird.

Once his parents have exhausted their guests and themselves with their unending stories, Finn makes conversation with Han and Leia in the kitchen while the both of them set up six places at the table. Ben, who does not feel like listening to his parents sigh rapturously as Finn recalls the article written about him in the human interest section of the Times, takes his glass of wine to the front room to escape the company.

That's when he stumbles upon Rey, wandering around, continuing her explorations alone. She doesn't seem to notice him when he enters through the kitchen door. She's intent, focused on peering at the photos on the wall (Ben cringes at her expression of pure delight when she spends a long minute looking at one of him in high school, awkward and gangly and even weirder looking then than he is now), trailing her fingers along the furniture, and picking books at random from the shelves lining the walls.

She's pulling out a well-worn copy of _The Age of Innocence_ , thumbing through the yellowed pages, when Ben finally clears his throat, taking a few steps into the room.

She nearly jumps out of her skin at the sound, as if she'd been entirely unaware his presence. She settles back down when he smirks, walking closer, and straightens her back when he gets near enough to take the book from her and look over the front cover.

Their fingers do not touch when it passes between them.

“Big Edith Wharton fan, are you?” he says, paging through the book as delicately as he can with his overlarge hands. When he glances back at Rey, she is distracted by something, staring at his fingers between the pages of the book. When he prods her, “Jackson,” her eyes snap back to his face, her jaw snapping shut with a click.

She shrugs, her voice betraying nothing but careful nonchalance. “I've never read it, actually.”

“You should,” he says quietly. She rolls her eyes, her mouth opening as if she's getting ready to chastise him for ordering her around with his pretentious sensibilities, but he doesn't give her the chance to say it. “Maybe not though. It's not one of your Disney movies, so it doesn't have a happy ending.” After a moment of thought, he adds, taunting, “You probably wouldn't like it.”

Rey, stubborn little upstart that she is, takes the bait. “Do _you_ like it?”

Ben really does try not to grin. He has no idea if he succeeds. “Yes.”

She squares her shoulders, head lifted up in challenge. “I can handle sad. Let's see—” She steals the book out of his hand easily, before he can so much as blink, and opens to the first page, her eyes darting as she skims through the opening scene. “Wow,” she murmurs after a minute, “this Newland guy sounds like a mega-douche.”

He resists the urge to scoff out loud, settling for rolling his eyes. “That's the point of the character.”

“To be a rich, pompous solicitor who lazes about watching opera?” She pushes out a snort of derision, smirking, as she continues to flick through the pages. “No wonder _you_ like it.”

“It's not about that,” he protests. “Not really anyway.”

“Yeah?” The book bangs shut in her hands, and she holds it out to him. “Enlighten me then.”

“It's about being...trapped, even if it's just by your own poor decisions. It's about vanity and classism. It's—” He hesitates for the briefest moment, meeting her eyes before he flickers his gaze to the bookshelf. He shrugs his shoulders, muttering, “It's about being in love.” Ben searches through the shelf to find the place where she found the book, moving two fingers between _This Side of Paradise_ and _As I Lay Dying_ to make a wide enough opening to put _The Age of Innocence_ back. When he looks down at Rey once more, her full, pink lips part as she stares at his hand again.

Weird.

“Besides,” Ben adds. “Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for this.”

Rey clears her throat, her voice slightly too breathy for the dryness of the conversation. Also weird, Ben thinks. This entire day, he thinks, is too strange by half, and no on has even sat down for dinner. “Maybe I'll give it a go,” she says. “For the sake of feminism.”

“Right. God forbid you ever do something just because I recommended it.”

She smiles meanly. “Exactly.”

They are both quiet for a moment. Ben suddenly wants, on a level that seems almost too big to contain, to know what she's thinking about. There is a flush that creeps along her cheeks, her neck. There is a curl of hair that's sticking out of the style on top of her head, an errant lock that he wants to tug on like a loose thread, to see if it might unravel the entire updo situation.

He would like to know what she looks like when her hair is down. Purely for curiosity's sake, of course.

He shifts on his feet, feeling unnervingly like a teenager shuffling his feet in front of a girl he has a crush on. Which he definitely is not, and doesn't have, so the comparison is moot. “So why are you out here with me anyway? Shouldn't you be with your boyfriend?”

She scoffs. “A,” she says loftily, “I'm not _with_ you, and B, what on earth are you talking about, my 'boyfriend'?”

Ben jerks his head in the direction of the kitchen, his forehead wrinkled in abrupt confusion. “Finn,” he says, stating the obvious.

Rey furrows her brow, her mouth turning down slightly. “Finn is not my boyfriend.”

Ben blinks. _What?_ “What?”

She looks just as confused as he feels. It is hardly a reassurance. Ben feels almost like his brain might explode, or like his heart might beat out of his chest or crawl up through his throat, or like he might throw up. Maybe all three at once. It makes no sense, what she said or his body's response to it. It makes absolutely _no sense_ —

“We're flatmates,” she says. “Did you think—?”

His mouth is dry. “What?” He coughs into his fist, feeling thrown entirely off course, like one of those old explorers who thought they were finding a shortcut to the New World but really just ended up frozen in the Arctic, being chased around by murderous polar bears, like in that TV show his mother keeps telling him to watch. “I didn't—”

She interrupts before he can embarrass himself further. “I don't—” She stops too, looking everywhere around the room but at Ben. “I don't have a boyfr—”

“So, Rey,” Han interrupts, emerging from the kitchen, with Finn and Luke—damn it all to hell, he must have slipped in through the side door—following behind him. “How do you feel about _London Calling_?”

Some of the tension leaves Ben's body, and he has never been more grateful for a distraction in his life. “Oh, god, Dad,” he says, pleasantly surprised when his voice doesn't shake, “don't quiz your guests.”

“I'm not quizzing anybody,” Han claims, a clear lie. “Just trying to get an opinion on what I should put on for some background music!”

Rey grins. “It’s a great album.”

Han smiles, giving a thumbs up, and her smile only grows wider. “Leia and I just got this great new speaker system, _surround-sound_ —”

“Oh, nice,” Finn says, his expression brightening, “what kind of gear are we talking about?”

Han glances away from Rey, gesturing for Finn to follow him to the speakers on the other side of the room. Ben watches as a flash of something like disappointment crosses Rey’s features, before it disappears into forced neutrality. “C'mere, kid, I'll show you.”

Ben opens his mouth, feeling, oddly, like he might be about to say something reassuring, maybe even something _nice_ , when he hears his name behind him in a familiar rumble.

He flinches, turning around as he registers Luke standing at his shoulder, as scraggly and blue-eyed and earnest as ever. “Luke,” he says grudgingly.

His uncle smiles serenely. “How have you been, kid?”

Ben doesn’t outright grind his teeth at the pet name, but it’s a close thing. Luke always sounds so _unnatural_ copying Han like that. “Fine,” he grits out. “And you?”

Luke shrugs. “Ah, you know, the usual.”

Ben frowns, wondering how angry it would make his mother if he turned bodily around and ignored Luke for the entire rest of the evening, when he sees, from the corner of his eye, Rey. Standing a foot away, her elbows cupped in her palms and shoulders hunched in as she stares around the room, like a child waiting to be called on to have a turn. Quiet and patient and pathetic. It stirs something dumb in him, makes him tighten his jaw and turn back to his uncle and say through clenched teeth, “You'll have to excuse me, I haven't made introductions. Uncle Luke, this is—”

Luke beats him to the punch, holding his hand out to shake Rey's. “Rey Jackson, it must be. _L'enfant terrible_ of Alliance Academy.” Ben rolls his eyes at the term. That is just like Luke, always so _pretentious_.

Rey's face splits into a grin, her posture improving, her entire being lighting up in the excitement of being recognized. So needy, Ben thinks as she steps closer to them, standing at his elbow. A helpless little thing. It makes something in him thrill, strangely, at the thought that he was the one who managed to actually help her even just for a moment, that he was the person who made her happy.

Shit, maybe everything he's been thinking and saying and doing is a sign there's a carbon monoxide leak. Maybe he should call the fire department, just like he had to when his father burned a microwave pizza in the oven when he was ten and his mother, shouting her head off at him over how stupid he was for leaving the plastic wrap on in the first place, almost got arrested on the front lawn for being a domestic disturbance.

“Well, I _am_ Rey,” she says, “although I'm not quite sure about _l'enfant terrible_. I'll take it as a compliment.”

“As well you should,” Luke says, his voice all of a sudden dripping with charm. Ben screws his eyes shut, trying to center himself by counting and breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth and fuck it, he wants to _throw_ something very breakable against the wall. “My sister showed me some of your sculptures. You're a very talented artist. And a Michigan alum, I hear.”

“Yes,” she says happily. “My concentration was art, but I worked as an aftercare teacher to put myself through school.”

Luke smiles without teeth, nodding. “How very American of you, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Although, if the powers that be saw fit to make college more affordable for the masses—”

“Excuse my uncle,” Ben says testily, “he’s spent too much time backpacking through South America, and he’s forgotten how to give an appropriate compliment.”

Rey meets his eyes, her own alight with amusement. “Sounds like someone else I know.”

Ben opens his mouth, inclining his head closer to hers, when Luke interrupts with, “How'd you find yourself stateside anyway?”

Rey shifts her weight, seeming slightly discomfited. “I—it's a really long story.”

Luke holds his hands out as if to say _go ahead_. “We've got time.”

Rey's arms close around her torso again, like she is making herself smaller. When she speaks, every sentence ends on an uptick, so different from her usual decisiveness. It is strange to hear, off-putting. It makes something in Ben feel unsettled. Unhappy. “I—I was in foster care after my mom died? In England?” She pauses while Luke murmurs polite condolences, clearing her throat like she hasn't used it in a while. “I wanted to find my dad when I was eighteen and found out he was an American, so I moved to Chicago to meet him, and? And yeah.” She holds her arms out, like a showman. “Here I am.”

Ben cuts in then, unable to hold back any longer, “Wait, you—you were in foster care?” Rey nods, her gaze focused somehow on him and on nothing at all. Ben shakes his head once, blinking. “I didn't know that.”

She lets out her breath in a rush, nodding at both of them. “Yep,” she says, popping the last consonant of the word.

Ben keeps staring, and staring, and staring at her. It is uncomfortable, and he knows he's making her uncomfortable, but he's trying to think, trying to remember her disappointment, her resentment, her sadness every time her parents come up. The way she accused him of being ungrateful. The way her eyes shuttered when Han looked away from her. His voice is quiet when he begins, “I—I'm sorry, R—”

“That's a long way to get to California.” Luke cuts through his apology, slicing her name in Ben's mouth down to the barest utterance of the first letter. Three letters. Luke goes on, oblivious to Ben's sudden rush of guilt, tied up with all his annoyance and anger and upset and, all the way at the bottom of it all, underneath everything else, a strange and lingering satisfaction, something that crept in and refused to leave the moment he heard the words _I don't have a boyfriend_. Which, yeah, he's not going to examine that in the slightest. “Chicago by way of England, Michigan by way of Chicago, and now, here you are. The promised land.”

Rey laughs, and Ben snaps back into reality. “It is where the celebrities live after all.”

Luke chuckles at the joke, and Ben manages the barest smile, his eyes still fixed on Rey. “Don't forget the weather. It's all anybody can ever talk about.”

Rey nods, grinning down at her feet. “I've been really lucky. It's so beautiful here. So...green. And warm.” Her voice is so gentle, almost reverent. It makes something in Ben's insides twist and curl and leap around. “And I've met so many great people, and...yeah.” Her smile grows, and she is— _radiant_. Just radiant. “I really, really love it here.”

Ben barely hears his mother when she announces to the room, “Dinner!” He only really notices anything happened when Rey walks away from him in the direction of the kitchen, and he has to take long, quick steps to catch up, finishing off his glass of wine in one swallow as he follows her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Yeah, you're afraid of what you need. If you weren't—if you weren't, I don't know what we'd talk about. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETDCbQUYiAQ)


	11. a is for angry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen........... _teens of denial_ is about benjamin chewbacca organa solo and that's that on that. actually most car seat headrest songs are about ben solo no i will not be taking criticism at this time
> 
> heartbreaking news about this chapter: ben is diagnosed with a severe case of idiot sad boy foot-in-mouth syndrome RIP benji u sweet, angry moron
> 
> this is a tough chapter. there are better times ahead, and now they are slightly closer than before! i m sorry 4 this :(

** 11\. a is for angry**

Ben doesn’t even realize he’s been staring at her for a majority of dinner until Rey looks right at him, knitting her eyebrows together, and mutters, sounding mildly annoyed, “What are you staring at?”

He blinks, turning his head to the side so he can look at her fully rather than from the corner of his eye. “The way you eat is...incredibly unnerving,” he says seriously, his voice pitched low.

She doesn’t seem to take it as the insult he intends for it to be. She doesn’t outright smile, but there is something in her face that tells him she’s pleased. Probably with how much she is bothering him with her graceless, animalistic table manners. If he found the incident with the kiwi unsettling (and hot, _fine_ , it was also distractingly, upsettingly _hot_ ), then the sight of Rey scarfing down cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and so many god damn bread rolls will be enough to haunt his dreams for _weeks_. “Yeah?”

His voice is dry when he assures her, “Like watching a flock of buzzards hack apart the flea-ridden corpse of a lion.”

She smiles harshly, without teeth. “Thank you.” She says the word _thank_ like what she really means is _fuck_. Ben doesn’t dislike it. It’d be even better if she were saying the word _you_ like she means _me_ , but if wishes were gooses, or however the saying goes.

“Benji.” When he glances at the head of the table, it’s to the sight of his mother, her expression stern and no-nonsense. She glares at him over the top of her glasses, raising her eyebrows meaningfully. “It’s not polite to comment on a woman’s eating habits.”

Rey actually snorts, and she meets his eye, her entire expression lit up in clear delight over the embarrassing nickname. She mouths silently, _Benji?_

Ben frowns at her before going back to his food, muttering a half-hearted apology to get his mother off his back. He hates Thanksgiving. Watching Rey devour her second serving of turkey only reminded him of that undeniable fact, a fact that he somehow let slip from his mind until a half hour ago when they all sat down to eat.

He’s pretty sure it was a carbon monoxide leak making him feel so relaxed earlier. Because, really—being nice to Rey? When she has invaded his house? Including her in a conversation so she wouldn’t be standing alone and sad and awkward? Trying to apologize to her because he didn’t know about her difficult upbringing, and he suddenly felt all guilty and wrong inside for how he has been treating her?

Oh, god. He almost called her by her _first name_. At least Luke saved him from that, even if that's the only thing that asshole has ever done to help him.

He hates her, Ben reminds himself firmly. The entire afternoon changes nothing, the thing about her childhood changes nothing. They have a truce to not be openly hostile, but, he determines, that doesn’t change his feelings about her, which are: dislike. And hatred.

Ben sets his jaw as he passes the gravy boat from his father down to his mother, reaching across Rey as he does. Something changes in her breathing until he settles back into his chair, and when he looks back at her, her face is blushing a faint pink, a wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows as she looks up to the ceiling at nothing. Which, okay, she must really hate having him be so close. He needs to move his chair further away.

He doesn't. He digs his fork into his turkey and then doesn't eat it.

His parents are seated at either end of the table, Luke and Finn sitting on one side, and Ben, inexplicably, is beside Rey on the other. They both must have the worst luck in the world if they are constantly being forced to sit together like this. Maybe she was cursed by a pagan witch that she screwed over legally, too, and was also soundly smited. Smitten. Smote? Smote. He's pretty sure it's smote.

But all of that is beside the point. The point being: Ben hates Thanksgiving, almost as much as he hates Rey.

He furrows his brow, mulling this true statement over as he works his way through the stuffing he has disliked since childhood, and which his mother forced him to eat every year, because _some_ kids would give _anything_ for the chance to eat even _some_ of their beautiful meal, kids like perfect, nice, unbelievably attractive _Rey,_ who would have been a better and more grateful child to us anyway, _Ben_.

He hates Thanksgiving almost as much as he hates Rey, he thinks. A factual enough sentence with a good grammatical structure. And yet it doesn’t sound quite accurate when he thinks it. Maybe it should be that he hates Rey almost as much as he hates Thanksgiving? Maybe he doesn’t hate Thanksgiving anymore? Maybe he doesn’t—

“If wishes were horses,” he mumbles to himself. That’s the expression, he remembers now. _If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride_.

Satisfied that he recalled the phrase at last, Ben looks up to see Rey staring at him, openly bewildered. He feels a flush darken his face just as she mutters, “What in the world are you talking about?”

Han claps his hands together, a booming sound that ceases all conversation at the table while they turn to look at him.

“How do we feel about the Sex Pistols?” he announces. “Would that be good?”

Ben is glad for the distraction, and also that he is not the only person who seems extremely confused by the sudden proclamation.

Finn furrows his brow, his eyes blank as he says, “The Sex Pistols?”

Han nods, grinning, as he fiddles with his phone, pressing the screen achingly slow. “For the background music! Ben showed me this thing that lets me change it on the speaker, Bluemouth—”

“Bluetooth,” Ben corrects automatically.

“I'm not sure the Sex Pistols are an appropriate soundtrack for Thanksgiving, Han,” Leia says, laughing a little at her husband. “The Clash, too. They're both...too English. No offense, Rey.”

Rey just smiles brightly, her eyes alight with contained bemusement as she says, “None taken. We’re not too complimentary about you lot back home either.”

A ripple of laughter goes around the table. Ben clenches the hand holding his fork at the sound, glaring mindlessly at the turkey he’s been not so much eating as just moving around on his plate. Of course they all just love her so much. Luke practically fell all over himself to be nice to her.

“We have an English guest,” Han defends. “I want her to feel at home.”

Luke snorts, just barely derisive. “Rey, have you ever even heard of those bands?”

Ben is fairly sure he’s not imagining the irritation in her voice when she replies, “Yes, actually, I have.” He’s decently well-versed in what Rey sounds like angry. He hears it every time they interact, and he’s strangely glad he’s not on the receiving end of it for once. He’s gladder that it’s Luke who is.

Ben takes a sip of his wine, smirking into his glass as Luke leans back in his chair, nodding magnanimously.

“I'm impressed,” his uncle says.

“You shouldn't be,” Ben replies, still just a little too pleased with the sudden deterioration of Rey’s opinion of his uncle. Entirely too unforgiving, this girl, and entirely too ready to wear all of her emotions on her sleeve. “She's young, not a moron.” He must have imagined a look of gratitude crossing her face then, because when he glances at Rey to see if he's right, her expression is blank.

Han points at Ben with his butter knife and says, “This one used to love the Sex Pistols.”

Ben sighs. “Dad—”

“Oh yeah,” Han goes on as if Ben hadn’t even spoken. “Dead Kennedys, Buzzcocks. All those punk groups. Beastie Boys, too.”

“He likes shouty music,” Leia adds, smiling teasingly.

Finn’s face splits into a grin. “Punk, huh?”

“I find that very believable,” Rey murmurs. When Ben lowers his eyes to hers, he can see her expression has shifted to amusement again, a quiet mockery. Like she likes to watch him squirm. “California Über Alles,” she says, raising her glass in a mocking toast.

Han laughs. “Kid wanted to be Sid Vicious.”

“I liked that stuff when I was _thirteen._ ” When the divorced was finalized, when he ruined his parents’ lives, when he got worse and worse and worse until everybody at school _hated_ him, and all he wanted was to listen to someone else screaming about being anarchy and hating smiles.

“Dressed like him anyway,” his dad continues as if Ben hadn’t said anything at all.

Ben groans, praying it doesn’t sound quite as childish as it feels. No such luck, it seems, if only based on Rey’s expression of utter contempt and enjoyment over his humiliation. “I just like black, okay?”

“Han, honey,” Leia says gently, though sounding just as amused as everyone else, “I'm not sure Sid Vicious is the most flattering comparison.”

“No, no, you're right, you're right,” Han agrees. “Sid stabbed his girlfriend to death, which, God willing, Ben would never do.”

Ben lets his head fall into one of his hands, rubbing at his temple. God, he could use a Xanax. Maybe four. “ _Jesus Christ._ ”

Han keeps going, uncaring of his son’s discomfort. “And Sid, you know, lost every fight he was ever in. No self-preservation. My kid's only been in one real fight, and he didn't lose—”

“ _Han_ —” Leia’s voice is a warning Han does not heed, but it makes Ben’s head snap up, realizing just a beat too late to stop it where his father is going.

Oh, no. No fucking way he’d bring that up now.

Yet, apparently, he would.

“—well, I guess he did lose a little bit,” Han says, shrugging, “considering Luke had to expel—”

Ben’s hand slams on the table before he even knows it’s happening, and the silverware and plate in front of him jump and clatter out of place.

Just like that, the table goes quiet. The only sound he can hear is his own breathing, too harsh and too labored. Fuck this. _Fuck_ this.

His mother’s mouth twists, sympathetic. Always so sympathetic, never actually _doing_ anything. “Ben.”

“Wait, Solo,” Finn says, his voice too loud, suddenly intrigued, “didn’t you go to Alliance? Did you get expelled?”

Ben glares at his father murderously, but when he manages to speak, it doesn’t sound nearly as furious as he wants it to. “Why would you bring that up?”

“Ben,” his mother says softly, “honey, it was a long time ago.”

“And you have to admit, it was kind of cool,” Han adds.

“What happened?” Finn asks, seeming almost excited.

“Are we doing this now?" Ben asks, his voice rough. "Really? In the middle of dinner, in front of my coworkers?”

“Kid won a fight.” Han sounds almost proud. Ben remembers his voice over the phone after it happened, how he’d only really cared about who won, satisfied when the answer was his son. “More like a brawl, really, he took on three other kids—”

“The upper school has always had a zero tolerance policy for violence,” Luke points out, that smug, arrogant motherfucker.

“Can’t afford to make an exception,” Leia says quietly.

Luke wags his finger, as if he's about to describe the history of the universe rather than the honor code of a high school. “Now, there is a reason for that—”

“Right,” Ben snarls, dangerously quiet, “because like you always told me, _kids get timeout and adults get jail time_ , how could I forget that?” He crumples his napkin in his lap, throwing it on top of his half-finished plate, wishing if were something that could shatter, make noise, ruin something precious. If wishes were horses, and all that. “It was my junior year. I was trying to apply for college, and you fucking _kicked me out_ —”

“Language, Benjamin,” his mother interrupts tersely.

Luke sighs heavily, as if he is the one being put on the spot. Ben wants to pitch his closed fist right at his uncle's nose. “How times do I have to apologize for something that happened over fifteen years ago?”

Ben lets out a sharp, cold bark of incredulous laughter. “You've _never_ apologized to me.”

Luke denies it immediately, of course. “That's not true.”

“It is. You've defended, and justified, and excused. You've never apologized.”

Luke stares at him from across the table. Ben is acutely aware of everyone's eyes on them; he's even more aware of Rey sitting next to him. He must seem so... _pathetic_ to her. “You're right," Luke says after a long moment. "Well, here it is: I apologize, Ben. I know it wasn't your fault. I should've been more understanding. I'm sorry.”

Ben stands up, shoving his chair clumsily away from the table. “I'm sure you are,” he hisses. He doesn't know why he agreed to come to this. He doesn't know why he goes home at all; it's always _something_.

“Ben,” his mother intones, sounding every inch the career educator. “Sit down. Be gracious.”

He curls his hands into tight fists, his fingers aching, nails digging into the flesh of his palm. He breathes deep: one, two, three, four, five. _Sit down, Benji, I can't understand you when you're screaming like that_. “I'm not doing this,” he says tightly. “Everybody, enjoy dinner. I'm going home.”

He turns around and walks away, tearing a hand through his hair, his jaw clenched tight, and hoping nobody tries to go after him.

He barely makes it to the living room when he hears footsteps. Ben bangs the front door open and almost sprints down the stairs when he hears her voice, his last name called out to him in an English accent.

He flinches as he turns around. Not her. He would rather it be anyone but her.

Ben drags his eyes to Rey as he stands amidst the Birds of Paradise on the walkway to the house, and he stares up at her darkened silhouette on the top step of the porch. The words are slow coming from his mouth, wrenched out of him like impacted teeth. “What are you doing out here?”

Rey shrugs, a glimpse of a smile flickering over her delicate features. “I thought you could use an unfriendly face,” she says, sounding almost like she's trying to make a joke.

He grimaces. “Just back off, Jackson.”

She crosses her arms, obstinate as ever, and jerks her head in the direction of the house. “You should come back inside.”

He lets out a scornful sound, shaking his head. “I don’t need your fucking pity.”

She snorts, walking two steps down. “My pity?” she says. “I don’t pity you. Who cares if you got expelled? It didn't change anything for you. You still got into college. You still went to Stanford. You’re rich as sin, and you don’t even seem to notice it, and you have a great job. I literally cannot be further from pitying you.”

Ben doesn't know how he ever thought he knew what humiliation felt like before this moment. This is just so much _worse_. “Why are you here?”

She blinks. “Because you—”

“No,” he says sharply, “I mean, why are you _here_? In my house, on Thanksgiving? What, were you hoping my fucking family would embarrass me? Are you—” He pauses when his voice chokes into nothing, and has to take a moment to collect himself all over again before he can continue. “Are you trying to _replace_ me, is that it? Good for you, then. You've succeeded.”

“I didn't want that,” she says, surprised and dismissive enough that he believes her. God knows why. “I don't want to replace you. I came because your mother invited me, and I thought—I thought it would be nice to spend the holiday with a family. I came because your mother and father are kind to me.”

“Why didn’t you go to Chicago?”

She blinks again. “What?”

“Your dad, in Chicago.” He speaks slowly, carefully, like he's trying to explain gravity to a pigeon. “Why didn’t you just go spend the holiday with him?”

Rey laughs, the sound of it like a sob in her throat. It twists something up inside him. ”Because he doesn’t have time for me,” she says, her voice clipped and irritated, even as her expression betrays her. “He’s this big shot lawyer, and when I finally met him all he asked was how big a check he would have to write for me to go away. Because—because he doesn’t _want_ me.” She holds his gaze steadily as she speaks, and Ben doesn't know when he moved closer to her. When she moved closer to him. All he knows is that they're standing eye to eye now, Rey on the bottom step of the porch, and Ben an arm's length away on the pavement. Her eyes are bright when she says, “Your family wants you. They _love_ you. Don't you get it? Don't you understand how much I would give to have even a taste of that? And you just cast it aside like it means nothing.”

He doesn't know, really, why he says what he says then. He isn't thinking of much of anything when he speaks, the way he used to when he was a child, when the only way he could tell anybody what he wanted in a way they could understand was by screaming it at the top of his lungs. The anger comes easy; the anger always comes easy. “So that’s why you always hated me then, right?” he says, mocking and cruel. “Daddy issues?”

Rey reels away from him like he slapped her, and it's _that_ quick. For all his rage to leave him—the turnaround is that fast, from abject, senseless fury to regret. When she speaks, she doesn’t sound angry anymore—only resigned and so, so _disappointed._ “You’re an asshole, Ben.” She turns away from him, her hands coming up to hold her elbows in her palms, her arms closed around herself like a string kept tight around a bag to keep its insides from spilling out.

“Wait,” he says before he can convince himself not to, and his voice is—desperate. Begging. If wishes were horses. “Wait, please, I'm—”

But by the time he says the word _sorry_ , she's already gone, fled back into the house, leaving Ben in front of nothing and no one. Thinking about everything else he could have said, _anything_ else he could have said, knowing it's too late for it now. How he could have confided in her, told her about how it felt to sit in his uncle's office, afraid and ashamed and hurt beyond belief. How he could have said he was sorry for all the times he underestimated her, all the times he said the wrong thing. How he could have said, _I don't know how it would even be_ possible _not to want you_.

He stands there like that for a while, surrounded by the smell of the flowers he's always hated. Then, he walks back to his empty car and drives away, alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ And if you really wanted to be kind, you'd have forgiven them a long-ass time ago. And if you really want to know how kind you are, just ask yourself why you're lying in bed alone. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bbmK079bCs)


	12. beautiful oops!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a warning: the events of the previous chapter are not really discussed here. there is a reason for this. because this is slow burn, and our dear protagonists have not two brain cells to rub together between the two of them. i promise, it will be discussed next chapter. i can not guarantee the conversation will be productive tho because ben and rey are DUMB BABIES. DUMB BABIES IN LOVE
> 
> also i will likely NOT wrap this up in 20 chapters, but i will change the count SOON

**12\. beautiful oops! **

Han calls on Friday morning. Ben wakes up to the sound of his phone buzzing discordantly on his nightstand, and he has to fumble with the buttons, cursing his stupid giant fingers when he keeps sliding along the wrong part of the screen to answer it.

His voice is groggy, thick with sleep, when he finally manages to say, “What is it?”

“Hey, now.” Han is somehow both contrite and jocular; the mixture of the two is what makes him such a particular pain in the ass. “Is that any way to greet your father?”

“I’m trying to sleep.” He was, at least. Probably no use for it now. “What do you want, old man?”

There’s a scuffle on the other end. For sure it’s his mother whispering instructions to his father. Han is noticeably more penitent when he says, “Just wanted to apologize for...” More scuffling. A stage whisper that he can’t quite hear, save for how stern it sounds. Han again: “I want to say how sorry I am for bringing up the whole...expulsion thing. Yesterday. I know you’re still touchy about it.”

Ben digs the heel of his palm into the hollow of his eye, stifling a groan into his forearm. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the gesture; he does. Growing up, nobody in his family ever apologized. After a fight, even blowouts involving screamed insults and slammed doors and the fire department being called (which, shamefully, was not a one-time thing), there would never be any apologies exchanged, never any discussion over the circumstances leading up to the fight, never any promises about what they would do better. Just a stilted silence and an awkward conversation tiptoeing around whatever argument had been had.

When his mother offered him a job four years ago, one of the things she’d promised was that they would actually talk about what bothered them, instead of sweeping it under the rug. That means: lots of apologizing. That also means: lots of discomfort.

Ben lets out his breath in a sigh, scrubbing a hand over his face. “It’s okay, Dad.” He forces a smile onto his face, knowing his mother’s preternatural ability to detect when he’s lying. “I—I should be over it by now anyway, right?”

Han chuckles, seeming relieved. “I still shouldn’t have brought it up in front of your... _friends_.”

Ben flinches at the unnatural emphasis his father puts on the word _friends_. Like he means it singular. Like he doesn’t mean _friend_ at all. “Dad.”

The word is an acceptance of his father’s clumsy apology. The word is a warning, a reminder that even if Han thinks—for no apparent reason, Ben might add—that Ben has some kind of—of a _thing_ for Rey, that Leia, God willing, remains blissfully unaware. The word is a plea to let the subject drop.

“Yeah, son,” Han says, the grin evident in his voice, even unseen, “I know.”

There are three weeks between the end of Thanksgiving break and the beginning of winter break. Every year, without fail, those three lousy weeks manage to make Ben seriously rethink his entire life, and it’s not just all the end-of-semester deadlines he has to meet hurtling toward him all at once.

This year, it’s worse for a different reason.

After the disaster of Thanksgiving dinner—after a weekend spent drinking until he feels dizzy but not nauseous and sad but in an extremely vague way, where he can only distantly recall why he is, and wandering around his apartment in misery and decaying on his couch while Netflix asks _Are You Still Watching “Mad Men”?_ (he is not, and he doesn’t really like Netflix much, but he says _yes_ anyway)—after one of the more mortifying and upsetting and overall shameful evenings of his life, Ben goes back to work to endure the worst three weeks of the year once more.

December is a month to be survived rather than lived. It was never all that great growing up, even before the divorce. Some of his parents’ worst fights were about Christmas presents, about Han spending too much money or too little, about his mother being too high strung or not reminding his father about the to-do list often enough that he’d actually remember. As an adult, it’s just another blaring reminder that he lives alone.

Not that he wants to live with anyone anyway. Not that he wants a sticky, pudgy kid running underfoot, forcing him to...bake cookies or some shit. Not that he wants a wife to nag him over all the things he’s doing wrong, another person to disappoint. Not that he wants someone to wake up to on Christmas morning, someone to pull into his arms, warm and soft, and bury his nose in her hair, and kiss the sleep from her eyes.

Ben doesn’t need that. He doesn’t care about any of that bullshit. However, he works in a school, and he sees reminders of the season everywhere the minute they return from Thanksgiving break. And now it’s worse, because he sees _her_ everywhere too.

He sees her in the cute little art projects decorating the wall along the third grade hallway. He sees her in the handmade wreaths hanging on every door in the lower school. He sees her when he actually _sees_ her, when he runs into her out in the parking lot, in the admin office, in the hallway. Her earrings are all holiday centric, her outfits all Tacky Christmas Sweater Day worthy, her demeanor all sunny and full of holiday cheer. Like a god damn Hallmark movie.

And every time she sees him, every trace of that happiness slips off of her like water off a duck’s back. Once, when she glances up from her heavy looking binder in the middle of the main hall of the lower school and registers him walking in her direction (going past her, not to her, obviously), she does a literal about-face, right in front of a class of preschoolers. Ms. D’Acy gives him a weird look, but she doesn’t even pause in her singing, “A is for apple! A-a-apple! B is for ball! B-b-ball!”

It doesn’t bother him. It definitely doesn’t bother him.

It’s not like he tries to meet her eyes every time their paths cross, or like he spends long minutes in the wake of her presence agonizing over the sight of her. No, that would mean he cares about her, or about her opinion, which he definitely doesn’t.

But: even though he doesn’t care, they are still the longest three weeks of his life.

Then, there is the Secret Santa gift exchange.

It’s all Rose’s fault, really. Because Rose is a little demon. Ben has always been aware of this to some degree. They were always somewhat connected after Poe and Paige started dating, the kind of acquaintances that made small talk at parties and could hold a decent conversation if they were forced into it. He walked her down the god damn aisle at Poe’s wedding, even. There are pictures of the evidence somewhere in her sister’s house, of Ben towering over Rose in a yellow maid of honor dress. Poe had wanted to do one of those corny dance down the aisle videos, and Ben refused. Rose took Poe’s side, but Paige took Ben’s, so it didn’t happen, luckily. However, ever since then, Rose seems to think that they have some kind of special bond with each other, and Ben doesn’t see any particular reason to disabuse her of that notion.

He likes Rose. He likes her flippy, untamable curls, and her thesis for her PhD in classics about something so obscure that it took him three reads to fully understand it, and how nice she is to him even when he’s being kind of a dick. It doesn’t change that fact that she’s a little demon, and she is the one responsible for what happens the day before winter break.

It starts with Secret Santa.

His mother holds a gift exchange every year, so the existence of Secret Santa is not the problem, strictly speaking. Ben has yet to participate, because he doesn’t like the pressure of trying to find a useful gift for someone he does not know well, and because he likes even less the social obligation of having to pretend he likes a present that he will end up donating to Goodwill after he finds it, unused, in his closet in three years. Mostly everybody else participates, including Rose.

And, unsurprisingly, Rey.

This is why he finds himself having to field a sudden, desperate request from Rose to drop off Rey’s Secret Santa gift in her classroom while the latter is out getting lunch.

Ben denies the request immediately. “Not doing that,” he says around his second cup of coffee of the day when she catches him coming out of his office.

Rose gasps like he just confessed to slaughtering a minivan full of puppies on their way to an orphanage.

He actually kind of thinks she should be thanking him for not throwing the phrase _fuck no_ into his response. Instead, she merely scrunches her face into a ball of rage and crosses her arms.

She looks about as intimidating as a freshly baked loaf of bread.

“You have to do it,” she says sternly. “I got held up during my one free period of the day, and Poe is slammed with entering final grades because he leaves it all until the last minute _of course_.”

“Get Finn to do it.”

Rose blushes at the very mention of his name. Aw. Adorable. “He doesn’t have the time. His kids have their lunch early, and he’s got a PLC during the time he’d normally have a free hour.”

“Ask literally anybody else.”

“I’m asking you, Ben. As a favor to me, as my groomsman—”

“I don’t think that creates the kind of connection you think it does—”

“—as a _decent human person_ with a heart that feels empathy, please just take this present to Rey’s classroom. I know you act like you hate her—”

He sputters lamely, “ _Act like_ —”

“—but she will not even be in it.” When Ben only continues to stare at her blankly, she changes tactics, adopting a posture of pure cuteness, tucking her fists under her chin and batting her eyelashes exaggeratedly. “Please, Ben? Please? _Pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaa_ —”

“Fine!” he bursts out, unable to take anymore. He’s not made of stone, after all.

Rose punches her fist through the air in triumph, satisfied with her victory, and Ben, reluctantly, takes the gift box wrapped in paper patterned with ice skating polar bears to drop off during Rey’s lunch period.

Because, he figures a little wryly, what could go wrong with such a simple, straightforward task.

The answer, he finds out the minute he opens the door to her classroom, is: a lot. A lot could go wrong.

The first thing is this—Rose was wrong about Rey not even being there.

Ben doesn’t see her at first, his thoughts preoccupied with the fifteen different things he has to get done by the end of business, before the entire school shuts down for winter break. His plan is to open the door, drop the present on the first flat surface he sees, and leave the lower school as fast as possible before anyone can see him on the lower level, in a dead-end hallway he has no business being in. His plan is to get out, clean and quick, finish his work for the day, skip the staff meeting, and leave school on the dot at 4 p.m., and hopefully spend two blissful weeks forgetting all about Rey Jackson.

His plan is bullshit. His plan collapses like a house of cards being built by a drunk parrot the moment he hears the sob coming from the corner by the sink. His plan changes the moment he tosses the gift onto one of the child-sized tables and starts walking toward the source of the sound, his body betraying him like the traitor it is.

Rey whirls around when he’s a few feet away, and the first thing he thinks is: why does Rey look like she's crying? Then: oh, shit.

Because she _is_ crying. She is standing in front of the sink she uses to clean paintbrushes and mason jars and glue off her pretty fingers, and she is crying with the tip of her nose all red and her eyes shining with tears and her thin shoulders shivering with wracking sobs. She chokes on her own heaving breath when she sees him, a wail breaking free from her as she asks (probably rhetorically, he thinks), “Why is it _you_?”

Ben is not good with many things. Among the list: Coca-Cola freestyle machines, Top 40 radio, social media, overly talkative bartenders, waiters, or really just anyone in the service industry that can’t understand the word _no_ , and too-small cell phones. If he had to rank his list in order, crying women would definitely be close to the top.

He takes a step nearer to her, his hands feeling useless and heavy at his sides. He doesn't like seeing anyone cry, really; he definitely doesn't like seeing her cry. It makes him feel wrong and bad and not normal at all. “Jackson, are you okay?”

She lets out a watery, sarcastic huff of laughter, gesturing to herself like the answer can be found on her body. Ben looks her up and down as she does, looks at her red Mary Jane shoes and black tights and green sweater dress with a rotund Santa Claus plastered over the front. “You look fine,” he says dumbly. Is she just now realizing how terrible her fashion choices are?

“No, you jackass,” she says. She sounds marginally more put together. Being mean to him is clearly a great help to her emotional state. “I meant I’m obviously crying, of course I’m not okay.”

Ben has...not even the faintest idea what to do. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks hesitantly.

“Ugh, no. Just—" she sweeps her arms at him in the direction of the door, "just _go away_.”

He considers this instruction. Does not follow it. “What’s wrong?”

Her eyes well up in fresh tears, and Ben wants to push them physically back into her eyes, his brain screaming in panic for him to _do something, do something right now, make her happy again!_

 _How?_ part of him wants to know, and the rest of him just yells louder, _make her happy again!_

“Like you would even care,” she says, her voice gone all whimpery and sad.

Ben edges just a bit closer. He could touch the tips of his fingers to her upper arm now. He’s got a long reach, so it's not actually that close, but still. The thought that counts. “I’m asking, aren’t I?”

She only cries harder at his words, burying her face in her hands, and his control, already on a tenuous thread to begin with, what with Rey stretching it to its limits, snaps.

Ben closes more of the distance between them and takes her hands in his, peeling them away from her face. He holds her hands there, pressed against his chest, stroking her knuckles with his thumbs in a way he hopes might be reassuring.

Rey stares up at him with those big, hazel eyes, and, slowly, her shaking stops, bit by bit. _Good_ , his mind coos, relaxing a fraction. _You did a good job, she will like you now!_

Ben shakes his head, just barely, berating his idiot brain because he doesn’t care about her liking him. Obviously. He _knows_ he doesn’t care. But, then, why is he still here? Why hasn’t he left yet? What is _wrong_ with him?

“What’s wrong?” he asks again, quieter than before.

Finally, she cracks. “Dr. Organa observed me today,” she tells him tremulously.

Ben furrows his brow, blinking. He’s known his mother to leave observations til the last minute before, but he’s mildly surprised Rey would be so broken up about it. “It didn’t go well?” he guesses.

She nods, biting her lip, more saltwater bubbling up from the corners of her eyes and spilling down her cheeks. “I was so terrible,” she cries, hiccuping every third word as she speaks. “Everything went wrong. I didn’t plan my time right on my lesson and none of the kids knew where to put their things away and I kept rushing and I didn’t have my materials ready and one of them asked me at the end of class what we were even learning about and all the boys kept acting up and I didn’t do good questioning and, and, and—”

“Rey,” he says, as gently as before, “calm down, you’re going to cry yourself sick.” That’s something his mother always told him. It feels natural to say it to her. Now that he knows why she's so upset, it's easy enough to be soothing, to be comforting. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. No, I _know_ it’ll be fine. Do you know how many times my mother yelled at me my first year here?”

She hiccups again, her eyes wide and wet, and shakes her head. There are curls of hair stuck to her open mouth. She hasn’t pulled her hands away from his yet, and there is a thrill that clenches around his ribs, shoots up his spine, at the thought of it. That she hasn't pushed him away, that she _wants_ him here. She should be angry with him; he can’t remember why, but he knows she should be angry with him. He deserves it. He can be better, he can make her happy—

“Well, I didn't keep a tally or anything,” he says, smiling ruefully, “but it was a lot. And I'm still standing, right?”

Her voice is barely a whisper when she asks, “What if she doesn’t like me anymore?”

“I promise that won’t happen.”

“But what if it does?”

The question makes something in his heart feel like it breaks in two. He shifts forward, tilting into her until his forehead bumps up against the crown of her head. He says, still so gentle, more gentle than he can justify, “That’s not possible.”

“You don’t mean that,” she murmurs, and he has to be imagining it, her hands slipping from his fingers to his chest, his hands moving to clutch her back, it can’t be something that’s really happening because this is the kind of thing he only allows himself to do in dreams, and if it were really happening he would be stopping it, and he’s not stopping it so he _has_ to be dreaming—

“But I do,” he says softly. “Who wouldn’t like you?”

Ben doesn’t really know what happens then. He thinks he might lose his mind completely. One second he’s just touching his head to hers, breathing her in, relishing the feeling of her in his arms, closer than she’s ever been. The next second he’s kissing her, or she's kissing him, or they're kissing each other. His mouth is on hers as she arches into his palm on the small of her back, and he doesn’t know when he put his hand there but he likes the way it feels, likes her tiny hands on his shoulders, drifting up to curl in his hair, and her soft, plush lips moving in between his—she tastes like candy canes and York peppermint chocolate, and he wonders if she's been snacking on Christmas candy all day—and then as fast as it starts it’s over again, Rey’s arms shoved in between their bodies to push him away.

Ben blinks, the lights of the classroom dizzyingly bright as his eyes open. He feels like he was just torn from the most torturous, vivid lucid dream in history. He feels like his lips are tingling from the lingering taste of peppermint. He feels like he just kissed Rey.

Then, he realizes.

Oh, fuck.

Oh, _fuck_.

Rey stares at him, wide-eyed and pale, her lips red and shiny and parted in shock. Mirroring on her face what he’s sure is an expression of abject panic on his own.

“What,” she says slowly, carefully, “in the ever-loving _fuck_ was that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I only grabbed your wrist. Or would you rather we kissed? ](https://youtu.be/Kp0AsSjCWW4)


	13. where the wild things are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they’re idiots in this chapter. none of this is appropriate for a school building. i hope it does not offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities.

**13\. where the wild things are **

Ben considers playing dumb for a good ten seconds.

 _What in the ever-loving fuck was_ what _, Ms. Jackson_ , he could say. _It’s highly inappropriate to curse in the workplace, especially when children could be around. Maybe you should go home early and we can cool our heads and just never speak of this again._

That, he recognizes eventually, would probably make things worse.

Rey is still staring at him. Standing, scarcely a foot away, and looking thoroughly tempting, with her hair slightly mussed out of its style and her cheeks flushed pink.

Ben feels dazed. Drunk. Stumbling blind.

He licks his lips and shrugs. “It was a kiss, Jackson.”

“I got that,” she hisses through clenched teeth.

He glances around the room as if looking for someone hiding under one of the miniature chairs. “Why are you whispering?” he stage whispers.

“ _Because—_ ” Rey settles back into a normal volume, batting stray hairs away from her face with a hasty hand as she speaks. “Because you _kissed_ me.”

“Yes, I got that,” he echoes, perhaps a little sarcastically.

Wrong move, he thinks. She looks borderline apoplectic. Maybe he should be more concerned about that. There are a lot of _shoulds_ flying around in his head right now, none of them in any way helpful. He _should_ leave the classroom. He _should_ just say it was a mistake and be done with it. He _should not_ try to kiss her again, especially when she looks as enraged as a feral cat and just as likely to try clawing his face off. “ _Why?_ ” she says, the word as forceful as a kick to the teeth.

Ben shrugs again.

It is, understandably, not the answer she was looking for.

“What the shit, Solo,” she bursts out. “You cannot just stand there and fucking—” She imitates his shrug, making an exaggerated, American-accented _I don’t know_ sound. It is not a flattering impersonation, to say the least.

“Well, what do you want me to say?” he asks drolly.

“I want you to give me a straight answer to my very simple question.”

“You were...” He gropes for a good word, one that won't make her completely furious. “Sad.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You kissed me because I was sad,” she says, skepticism dripping from her voice.

Ben bristles, bringing himself to his full height. The change in Rey is almost instantaneous as he straightens up; he could almost convince himself she looks...interested. “I could be asking you the same question, you know,” he says, his voice a low rumble.

“What?” she squeaks, folding her arms across her chest defensively.

“I could ask you why you kissed me,” he says patiently, as if she is one of his students. “Turnabout, I think, is fair play.”

She stammers, “No, it’s—I didn’t—”

“You didn’t?” It’s his turn to lift his eyebrows, unbelieving. “Oh, okay. If you say so.”

“Don’t turn this around on me. You were the one that leaned in—”

“ _I_ leaned in? You put your fucking hands in my hair—”

She gasps, “I did _not_ —”

“—and you kissed me back, I might add,” he continues hotly.

“What else was I supposed to do?” Her voice is pitched almost at a shout, her hands thrown up in the air.

Ben’s mouth goes suddenly dry as a thought suddenly occurs to him that hadn’t before. His stomach churns in abrupt, overwhelming guilt. “Are you saying—do you feel like I made you?”

Her eyes widen. “What? No—”

“Look, if I crossed a line, please go and file a complaint now, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable—”

She cuts him off, “No, I’m not—” She hesitates, pressing the tips of her fingers to her lips before letting her arms fold back together. “I’m not uncomfortable,” she says eventually.

Ben tries not to let on how much relief floods through him at her words. “Then what? What do you want me to do? I can’t take it back.”

“I want—I want—”

Unconsciously, he tilts closer to her, takes the smallest step forward. This close, he can smell the sweetness of her breath, the peppermint and chocolate and fuck if she isn’t the best thing he’s tasted all day. “What do you want?”

“I want,” she says finally, her voice hard, “for you to be a god damn grown-up and take some responsibility. _Admit_ to something.”

He laughs, incredulous. She is—insufferable. “I admitted it! I kissed you, okay? I take full responsibility, and you’re off the hook, so let’s just drop it.”

“God,” she says coldly, “you just want to take the easy way out of everything, don’t you?”

“Christ, you—you are a pill.”

“Oh, really?” She clenches her jaw, fingers curling tight around her elbows. “I thought _daddy issues_ were my problem.”

He groans, tearing a hand through his hair in frustration. “Come on, Jackson, I was angry, you know I didn’t mean that.”

“Oh, really? Do I know that?”

“You would if you let me apologize instead of running away every time you see me. Look, I’ll show you: I’m sorry—”

“Maybe I don’t want your apology,” she interrupts, ignoring his muttered, _you just proved my point_. “Maybe you just need to stop saying rude shit to me all the time,” she goes on angrily, “maybe you should take a tip from these literal children and _be nice_ for once in your miserable existence.”

“Are you kidding? I have tried. I have been trying to be nice to you, but you make it impossible.”

She huffs out a sound of irritated disbelief. “ _I_ make it impossible? How is what you choose to do my fault?”

“Jesus, you are twisting my words. I’m not saying what I do is your fault. You just—”

“I just what?” she hurls out. “I what?”

“You blow me off!” he says, overloud, too heated, and all of a sudden actually upset. Frustrating, this woman. Absolutely impossible to please. And yet, here is he, still trying to please her, and he has no idea _why_. “Any time I try to be even a little bit sincere, or nice, or _anything_ , you brush me off like I’m fucking dirt because—because you don’t want me to be nice. It’s easier for you to think that I’m this horrible, awful, evil person than to accept that you could be wrong about me.”

“I am not wrong about you. You are a demanding, sarcastic, entitled snob. Poor little rich boy,” she sneers.

“Yeah, well, you’re no picnic either. You walk through life with fucking blinders on, expecting everyone to bow down to you because you’re just so _cute_ and _good_ and _nice_ , with your tacky little outfits like you’re a ray of god damn sunshine. You’re a spoiled brat. You're a cartoon character.”

“ _I’m_ a cartoon character? You sound like one of the adults in _The Peanuts_ , all day long just _wah, wah-wah, wah-wah_ —” She flaps her hand open and shut as if to demonstrate a trumpet-like pattern of speech, doing a terrible impression of the adults in _The Peanuts_.

Ben crosses his arms as he watches her. “Wow, that is—that is really immature.”

“You’re immature,” she snaps, throwing her hands back at her sides.

“No, you are,” he shoots back, fully aware that he is proving both of their points.

“I hate you,” she says bitterly.

“ _Promise_?”

“Yes,” she hisses, raising her chin higher to glare at him. They're close, too close, it's too much, Ben can already tell the nearness of their bodies is going straight to his head— “I hate everything about you.”

“Oh, tell me more, please,” he says, mocking, “I’m dying to know.”

“I hate your stupid hair,” she spits out. “You look like you spend forty-five minutes on it every morning. How much money do you waste on leave-in conditioner a _week_?”

“You’re clearly jealous,” he says snidely, “since the only thing you can do with your hair is tie it up and hope no one notices how frizzy and lifeless it is.”

She ignores him, pressing even closer as she speaks, craning her neck back so she can keep her eyes on his. “And I hate your clothes, too.”

“I hate _your_ clothes. You come here every day looking like Ms. Honey dropped acid.”

“I hate your stupid fucking face. Your giant nose, and your beady little eyes, and all the moles, and your—” Her eyes lower to his lips as if searching for inspiration, “your mouth, and—”

“I hate your face, too,” he says, his voice suddenly quiet and dark, and it’s a lie, he knows it’s a lie, and why is he lying, he can think of a million things he hates about her but instead he’s _lying_ , “your fucking freckles and dimples—”

“I hate—” She pauses and inhales deeply, her eyes drifting shut for a moment before they slowly open again, almost half-lidded— “I hate your hands, they’re more like paws—”

“You taste like candy,” he says, sounding desperate even to his own ears, wracking his brain for something cruel, something he truly dislikes, and coming up empty, over and over again, “it’s too sweet, it’s—it’s nauseating, _sickening_ —”

“You’re too big,” she says, her voice suddenly quiet, her eyes glazed over.

Poe must have spiked his coffee. He has to have, because Ben feels nearly drugged when he finally manages to choke out, “You’re too small.”

Rey looks about as intoxicated as he feels, her jaw slack, her eyes lowered again to his mouth. “You’re—you’re—”

“Rey?” he asks, concerned at the sudden change in her voice, in her face. If he didn’t know any better, he would say she was—

“Just shut the fuck up,” she breathes. “For once, Solo, just—”

She leans up, or maybe he leans down, and it doesn’t matter anymore because his mouth is on hers and somehow, absurdly, insanely, they are kissing again. He wraps his arms around her back, instinctive, needing her as near as possible, pulling her flush against his chest. It’s so much better than before—and so much worse, in every possible way.

Everything about her is small and sweet, so easy to hold in his hands. Ben wants as much of Rey as she can give him, wants the shivers that run through her body when she threads her fingers in his hair again (he knew she put her hands in his hair, he _knew_ it), wants the needy sighs and whimpers he elicits when his fingers tighten in the fabric of her dress, wants the feeling of her body molded into his, her soft little curves pressed up against every part of him. Every part. His lower half can feel it, too, reacting with an almost terrifying level of interest to the proximity, the warm, open space he slides his tongue into between her lips, the warm, open space he wants to settle into between her legs. He could use his lips there, too. He licks into her mouth, rolling his tongue against hers, _with_ hers, trying to taste every part he can, wanting more of that sweetness, more of that taste that’s specifically _Rey_ , something soft and natural and familiar and new.

She lets a helpless, breathless moan slip into his mouth, and that’s when all hell breaks loose.

For a long minute, Ben forgets about everything, because _this_. This is everything right now. He forgets completely where they are, and what he was supposed to be doing. He forgets that she hates him, forgets that they just had an extended back-and-forth about each and every detail she detests. He forgets that he is supposed to hate her, because it’s with a sudden, horrific jolt that he realizes, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t hate her at all.

His hands are greedy, wandering places they definitely shouldn’t, curling around the back of Rey’s thigh to cup her ass, his fingers dragging up her chest to palm one of her tits over her dress before they return to her waist, to the small of her back. _Perfect_ , he thinks, a little wild, a lot out of control, and achingly hard, she is perfect, made for him. Made for him, perfect, he knows she’ll feel so good when he can open her up the way he wants, spread her legs, get her all wet and desperate until she begs for relief—his mouth shifts, moves from her lips to nip at her jaw. He hears her sharp intake of breath, hears her whine, “Ben.”

He grins, wolfish, against her skin, dipping his head so he can bite at her throat, just the way he pictured when he first saw her. Even then, he knows it now. Even then, he wanted her like this.

Ben presses forward, moving into her, trying to figure out a way to get more of those sounds, more of all the ground she’s conceding, more of the feeling of her in his arms, when he miscalculates where they are (because he has forgotten _completely_ where they are, because he has _lost his mind_ ) and pushes her into the lip of the metal sink.

It seems to jar something in Rey, shake loose the common sense that is nowhere to be found in him, and a horrified gasp is the only warning Ben gets before she shoves him away. For the second time in fifteen minutes.

He stumbles back, his hands caught in the air between them, like he is still trying to reach for her. It takes him a second before he realizes why this is the worst thing he's ever done, and then, he remembers.

He lifts one hand and scrubs it hard over his face, trying to catch his breath as Rey panics.

“Oh my god,” she’s babbling, “this is—we are in a _primary school_.”

The sentence is like a bucket of cold water. Which, considering the state of his dick and their geographical location, can only be a good thing. He winces, willing his body to calm down by trying to remember everything distinctly non-erotic: his parents, baseball stats his dad drones on about during dinner, Poe reciting _The Iliad_ in dactylic hexameter, Hux complaining about the layout of the library, Hux in general. It works, after a minute, and Ben feels dizzy with relief that he won’t be forced to hide an erection while walking through the halls of an elementary school.

Jesus fucking Christ, he is going straight to hell for this.

He’s definitely going to hell for all the thoughts he has when he chances a look at Rey. She looks like a disaster. Lips wet and thoroughly kissed, even more of her hair falling over her cheeks, half of it still up in a ponytail, her dress rumpled and riding higher up her legs than it did before.

Ben wants to make a _mess_ out of her. He wants to take her home and keep her in bed for the next two weeks. He wants—

He wants all of her. Every single piece.

“I have a class coming in—oh my god, what if I had kept my blackout curtain rolled up?”

He blinks, finally registering Rey pacing back and forth in front of him, her hands working frantically to tie her hair back up. There’s a flash of dismay that stutters through him that he won’t see it now, what Rey looks like with her hair down, before he manages to croak out, “What?”

She points emphatically to the door which, fuck, definitely wasn’t locked for any of that. “On the door, for the window, I rolled it down but—” He glances and sees what she’s talking about, a bright yellow curtain unfurled over the window slat, ordinarily used for a lockdown drill. She must have unrolled it to prevent any passersby from peeking inside and seeing her crying. Luckily, it also stopped anyone from seeing them make out like revved up teenagers in the stacks of Hux’s precious library.

“Oh god, anyone could have—oh god, oh my god.” She presses the heel of her palm to her temple, her eyes flickering back and forth, staring at nothing.

Ben takes a hesitant step forward, his fingers reaching out automatically, searching for a part of her he can cling to. “Rey,” he says cautiously.

Rey finally looks at him then, her expression overshadowed by hysteria. “You need to go,” she says feverishly. When he only continues to stand there, frozen to his feet, she snaps louder, “I have a class in three minutes, get out!”

That, at last, jars him into action. He walks to the door, his ears burning with embarrassment, with excitement, with confusion and dread and a horrible shiver of satisfaction.

Ben turns at the last minute, his eyes locking onto hers where she stands, still, at the sink, looking a bit more put together save for her mouth. Nothing that anyone would notice if they didn’t know what she’s been doing, but he knows. He’s the one who kissed it all red and swollen and tender enough to sink his teeth into.

“I left your Secret Santa gift there,” he says haltingly, his hand on the doorknob. Even from across the room, he can see the deep, shuddering breaths Rey is taking in, and out, and in again. “It’s from Rose, by the way.”

That seems to do the trick. “Get out,” she shrieks, her hands curling into cute little fists at her sides.

Ben turns the knob and walks out of the room, past the class full of second graders that are starting to line up just outside of her door.

Somehow, he gets all of his work done for the day. Ben has no idea how, distracted as he is by the memories flooding through him at the most inopportune times.

Thoughts of her hot little mouth opening up for him, her tongue darting out to lick kittenishly at the seam of his lips, the way he once saw her lap at her own fingers after her lunch. Thoughts of her body pressed deliciously against his, her hands tugging insistently at his hair, her moans that he swallowed up greedily, desperate for more.

They're going to have sex. She can’t deny it now, the attraction between them, she can’t pretend like she doesn’t feel it, too. She wants him, just like he wants her.

He finishes his work in a stupor, anxious for the hour hand on the his office clock to hit 4 p.m. He’ll go to the staff meeting and get her number. He’ll keep her in bed for two weeks. He'll be nice when she wants him to be nice and mean when she wants him to be mean.

The plan is a little blurry about what will happen after that, but Ben is certain he can improvise when the time comes.

The end of the day can’t get there fast enough, and when it finally happens, Ben closes out of everything, shuts his computer down, and practically tears out of his office, running directly into—

“Dameron?”

Poe grins widely. “Hey, man, I was just looking for you. You get the email?”

Ben resists the urge to shove past Poe, his eyes unfocused as he says rapidly, “What? No. What email?”

“Your mom cancelled the staff meeting. Says it can wait until our PD day when we get back, and we should enjoy an early start to the break.” Poe laughs, clearly delighted, even as dread drops heavy into the pit of Ben’s stomach. “Thank god, am I right? I think if I have to sit through one more seminar on integrating social-emotional learning with regular instruction, I will literally put a bullet in my—”

Ben interrupts him, unable to listen to one more word. “When does the lower school end their day?”

Poe snorts. “What kind of a question is that? Why do you want to—”

“Just answer me, please.”

Poe stops in the middle of his stride, turning to stare at Ben with utter confusion. “3 p.m. Why are you asking? Is it—”

That’s all Ben needs to hear. “I have to go,” he says distantly.

He nearly sprints away to the stairwell, only vaguely registering Poe calling after him, “You’re acting even weirder than usual, Solo.”

Ben goes straight to the parking lot, not wanting to risk wasting time going to her classroom, and the minute he gets outside it’s immediately apparent the entire lower school staff already left.

He searches the lot with his eyes, trying to find her beige-gray, red-doored car somewhere, anywhere. Seconds tick by with him standing at the school's exit, staring at a quickly emptying parking lot.

Then, with a hot rush of disappointment, he finally realizes there’s no use in looking anymore.

She already left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ 'Cause you're so hot it's hurting my feelings. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn3cHUtNZKo)


	14. the cat came back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh man writing about winter break made me all nostalgic for 2015 reylo. i started shipping them when he took his helmet off and it was a hot dude underneath lol bc im a basic bitch. i then immediately spent the rest of my winter break from college watching girls bc adam driver is in it. a real true story.
> 
> THIS AND THE NEXT CHAPTER WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ONE CHAPTER BUT I SPLIT THEM INTO TWO I AM SORRY!! there was too much and i am dumb
> 
> anyway, here is some aftermath of An Event. i don’t know how to pronounce açaí, but for the sake of the joke pls imagine everyone except for rose is getting it wrong

**14\. the cat came back **

Clearly, the list needs some revision.

Ben creates a new one during the first day of break. He debates writing it down for posterity’s sake, but decides that would be tempting fate too much, and could result in some ridiculous sitcom-like situation wherein someone (Rey) finds the list with big capital letters at the top declaring the _REASONS HE SHOULD NOT HAVE SEX WITH REY (REY, HIS COWORKER, JUST IN CASE YOU MIGHT BE TRYING TO EXPLAIN AWAY THIS LIST BY SAYING IT COULD BE A DIFFERENT REY)_. Instead, he keeps the list in his head, as a sort of meditative mantra while he watches old episodes of _The Twilight Zone_ (the least sexually-charged show he enjoys that he can think of) and eats wheat thins and drinks coffee until he’s all jittery.

The list reads as follows:

1\. So what if he doesn’t hate her anymore? It’s obvious they still don’t get along well enough to have a civilized conversation. Every interaction they’ve ever had has devolved, and quickly, into furious insults and/or, based on recent events, making out. Not exactly a great start to a relationship.

2\. Also, why would he even call it a _relationship_? She is still ten years younger than him. That has not changed. He has no idea what she’s looking for. What if she’s one of those crazy Christian broads that wants to get married after two months? He barely has a clue what he’s looking for, but he definitely doesn't need a _girlfriend_ or anything stupid like that (it’s probably just sex, anyway, what he's looking for).

3\. They are still coworkers. Even if she isn’t dating Finn, it’s not a good idea to pursue a woman he works with who has already made her disinterest in him perfectly clear. Yes, she kissed him, and, _yes, okay_ , the sound of her breathless whisper of his name when he bit her neck will haunt his dreams for the rest of winter break, if not his entire life, but still. She left early, deliberately avoiding him. She didn’t _want_ to see him.

4\. She hates him, still. She thinks he’s a prick, still. And there is nothing Ben can do to convince her to think otherwise.

(It's _definitely_ just sex, he determines. He doesn't care about anything else.)

Ben reminds himself of all of these reasons why it would be a bad idea every time he feels tempted to beg Poe for her number. Because the thing is, contrary to popular belief, he is not completely incapable of seeing reason.

It would have been easy for her to find him, easy for her to wait for him if she wanted to see him. Ben may be a total piece of shit for many reasons, but never let it be said he can’t take a fucking hint.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to stop him from continuing to masturbate to thoughts of her, especially now that he knows what kinds of noises she makes, what her tongue feels like wrapped around his, the soft, gentle weight of her in his hands.

And they were— _really good_. All of those things. The weight of her, her tits and her ass, and her open mouth, and her pretty little sounds, and _everything_. She felt really, _really_ good, and that was just making out, just over the clothes groping, just with his _hands_ , and so he can’t help it. Can’t help imagining how much better she will feel on his cock.

So.

So, _whatever_. Baby steps.

For Christmas, he spends the morning at the house, exchanging small gifts with his parents. Han and Leia are easy people to shop for, especially now that they have both lost almost all sense of shame and spend the entire month of December dropping “subtle” hints about what he should get them. He gets his father a handful of remastered records he asked for, and his mother would never turn down boots from Chanel.

Leia does most of the holiday shopping, and she gets him somewhat aspirational gifts every year, so Ben is thoroughly unsurprised when his gifts turn out to be a houseplant, a Diptyque candle, and a throw blanket that he is certain costs more than she’d ever care to admit aloud. 

“You need to make your apartment more homey,” she tells him sternly as he stares blankly at the leafy, overgrown fern in his hands.

Ben rolls his eyes. “I’m assuming this is all somehow connected to your insistence that I be married by this time next year, correct?”

“Yes,” Leia says simply.

Ben groans, but he thanks her for the gifts anyway.

His dad, on the other hand, gives him a collection of all his old t-shirts.

“Vintage,” he says excitedly. “It’s cool now!”

After presents, his mother insists on brunch at the house, making the same apple turnovers she has made since he was a child, using the same china from her wedding day (the first wedding; Ben didn’t attend the second). Ben, for whatever reason, appreciates the ritual. He rarely eats something that outrageously sweet.

 _Except he could_ , his traitorous mind whispers, _if_ _he ate_ Rey.

Ben shakes his head, blinking hard at the plate in front of him, and tries not to think anymore about _that_ with his parents sitting not three feet away.

That, he thinks, is fucked-up even for him.

It’s the only thing he can think about for the next five days. What she will taste like. How she’ll feel dripping all over his mouth, onto his tongue like the sweetest nectar. She sounded so lovely, all her little moans and whines, when they were just kissing; he bets she'll sound even better when she _comes_.

She’ll probably taste good enough for the whole _year_. _Just once_ , he decides, a little manically as he unbuckles his belt. He’d like to fuck her just once. Just to satisfy his curiosity. Just to try it. Just to _feel_ her.

The reasonable part of him is not thrilled at this, at the fact that Ben has already given himself tacit permission to change the terms of his list from why he’ll _never_ fuck Rey to why he’ll fuck her _just once_ (if he _happens_ to get the chance), but, fuck it. Who is he trying to impress?

Ben takes his cock into his hand, already hard and aching, and closes his eyes so he can picture it, just the way he wants.

Poe usually drags him to some New Year’s Eve party, and Ben is almost looking forward to it this year.

Because, he reassures himself, one of two things will happen: 1. Rey is there, and he will have a chance to talk to her, and maybe tell her his completely logical reasoning for why they should try having sex, or 2. she is not there, and he can find another woman to sleep with. Ben isn’t usually one for one-night stands (too much work, too little reward), but considering the state of his libido (unnervingly high, like he’s gone back in time to his teenage years) and the length of time since he last had sex (probably far too long at this point), it’s probably a good idea to try getting some of his frustration out of his system. Maybe it would even get Rey out of his mind completely.

(Ben knows that's just wishful thinking. He also knows he won't try to sleep with someone else anyway even if she isn't there, or even if she turns him down.

That's how fucking _bad_ it is.)

On the 30th, Poe texts him that Paige is on ordered bed rest for the last few weeks of her pregnancy, and they will be skipping all parties this year. Paige, apparently, is none too pleased about it.

Ben is unsurprised she lives up to the cliche of doctors making the worst patients.

 _Rose is throwing a party though!_ Poe reassures him in his follow-up message. _You should go!_

The sad thing is, Ben actually debates the offer for a good minute before turning it down. If Poe isn’t there, he has no real reason to go; he’s not close enough to Rose, and he definitely isn’t close enough to Finn or anyone else she may have invited.

If he goes, it’ll be extremely obvious why he went. Ben can’t have Rey thinking he came to a party just to see her.

That would be pathetic.

He spends New Year’s Eve alone, with The Fern standing guard at his window, a silent, verdant, judgmental presence as he watches more television and catches up on a few books he should have read by now and jerks off to thoughts of someone he definitely shouldn’t be jerking off to.

And that, for the most part, is how he spends the whole two weeks of his winter break.

  
  


Monday of the week they go back is a professional development day, as it is every year.

Ben doesn’t mind PD days one way or the other. There are no kids, so everyone dresses down (sometimes way too much), and he can usually get a decent amount of work done, get lunch out somewhere, and skip out of work early. The trade-off is spending the entirety of the morning “developing professionally,” which can be useful, sure, but more often than not he just ends up getting extremely bored watching PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation.

There is, of course, the matter of knowing he is going to see Rey again, for the first time in two weeks. For the first time since they kissed and she ran away immediately after. The knowledge of it drives him a little crazy, makes him feel all tangled up in the pit of his stomach.

Which, he berates himself, is ridiculous. Why should he be so nervous anyway? He just wants to fuck her after all.

The day gets off to a rough start when he wakes up to the realization that he not only slept through his alarm and has barely five minutes before he needs to leave, but he also hasn’t done laundry in about forever. Ben has to throw on one of his dad’s re-gifted shirts, one from the top of the pile that he can only pray has no sex jokes written across the chest, and tug on a pair of jeans he figures is the least offensive from the pile overflowing from the chair in his bedroom. Last minute, he remembers he still has a couple of to-go breakfast containers stashed in his fridge, and he grabs one on his way out.

He manages to make it to work on time, and he is strangely pleased with himself for it. Since he heard recently that keeping people waiting is very rude.

Poe is the first person he sees coming up to the front doors, looking a little worse for the wear since Ben saw him last, a little bit frayed around the edges.

“Paige is the love of my life,” he announces as Ben approaches, “woman of my dreams, a kick-ass dermatologist, and a living, breathing nightmare.”

Ben smirks, pushing up his sunglasses to perch in his hair. “Bed rest is going well, I take it?”

“I just want that kid _out_ ,” Poe groans, “if only for the sake of my sanity. She’s due in a week, and I swear to all that is holy if that little motherfucker doesn’t move out of her uterus by then I am storming in with an eviction notice.”

“I’m sorry you’re going through this difficult time,” Ben deadpans. “It must be so hard to watch someone else bear your seed. I bet it'll be even harder when you have to watch her give birth to it.”

“Shut up,” Poe mumbles around an absolutely enormous bite of his bagel. “The baby is a boy, not an _it_ , and _I’m_ not the one wearing a Nirvana shirt to work.”

Ben glances down, finally registering what he put on for the day, shrugging at the sight of it. Honestly, it’s better than what he was expecting. “Laundry day,” he says by way of explanation.

The lunchroom is half full when they get there, and Poe makes a beeline for the table where they usually sit, Ben following reluctantly behind to take a seat next to him. Maybe-Hannah and Rose are already on the opposite bench, both of them chattering excitedly. Rose uses a lot of sweeping arm movements, and she nearly knocks Ben’s breakfast to the floor when one wayward gesture slaps the little container across the table.

The bowl spins across the plastic, caught at the last minute by a slender, delicate hand closing around the top.

Ben’s eyes travel up, up, up to see Rey standing at the end of the table. Every thought he has ever had seems to disappear all at once. His mouth goes dry. His brain shrieks in a sudden, overwhelming panic. He can barely remember his own name.

Rey, it seems, has none of those problems.

She snorts, glancing around the table at everyone but him. “Who the hell brings an açaí bowl to work?”

Ben clears his throat, reaching out to grab the container from her. She snatches her hand away before they can touch, and she sits down quickly on the other side of the bench from him. That, unfortunately, has the side effect of making it impossible for him to look at anything else. He can’t possibly, not when she is _right there_ , right there and so pretty and blushing and avoiding his eyes by any means possible.

He wants to kiss her again. Wants to hear her sweet little noises in his mouth, wants to make her lose control like she did before. This, he thinks, is probably a dangerous thought to be having. He should probably stop having this thought.

He does not stop having this thought.

“I don’t think it’s pronounced _açaí_ ,” he says, sounding remarkably calm all things considered. “I think it’s _açaí_.”

Rey opens her mouth, her brow furrowing, and she looks ready to fight him to the death over it when Poe butts in with, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s actually _açaí_. What do you think, Jannah?”

Ah, so that’s her name. “I’ve heard it as _açaí_ before,” Jannah ventures.

“Wait, I thought it was _açaí_ ,” Finn says, sounding confused, and Ben startles. He has...no clue when Finn got here. Finn must have come in with Rey, and yet Ben literally did not even see him.

Ben wonders, somehow for the very first time, if he may be in trouble.

“You are literally all wrong,” Rose is saying dryly, “because it’s _açaí_.”

A ripple of _oh_ s and _that makes sense_ s and _yeah that sounds right_ s goes around the table.

Ben lowers his eyes to open the bowl that was the subject of the extended argument, flickering his gaze back up to Rey as he starts eating. She’s pointedly not looking at him every single time he tries to meet her eye. In point of fact, she seems hell-bent on pretending he doesn’t exist at all.

Ordinarily, this would probably be worrisome. Instead, he has a completely baseless gut feeling that she’s... _afraid_ to look at him. Afraid of what she might remember if she does. Afraid she might like it too much.

Ben clings to this theory like a man heaved overboard would cling to a life preserver: as the only thing to keep his head above water. Even just looking at her, at the soft curve of her lips, the pretty pink flush of her cheeks, the gentle curls of the strays hairs at her temples, Ben feels distinctly like he might be drowning anyway.

“Oh, hey,” Poe says, lightly pushing Ben’s shoulder to pull him from his reverie. He points between Ben and Rey as they sit across from each other, grinning widely. “You guys are married.”

Ben can practically feel the color draining from his face, especially when he looks across the table to see Rey finally staring back at him, the same concern written across her features.

After a moment, he forces a smirk, rolling his eyes in a parody of nonchalance. “And why, exactly, is that?”

Poe points again to Rey, raising his eyebrows. “Hole.”

Ben chokes on his food. Rey bursts out, “ _What_?”

Poe laughs, clearly pleased to have struck a nerve. “Courtney Love? Kurt Cobain? Ring a bell?”

“What on earth are you—” Ben drops his eyes to the shirt Rey is wearing, finally registering it does, in fact, have the album cover for _Live Through This_ plastered over the front. “Oh,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Right. Hole. The band. Right.”

“Because Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain were married,” Poe adds, needlessly explaining the joke. “And you’re wearing a Nirvana shirt, and Rey is wearing a Hole shirt—”

“Yeah, I think we all got there, Dameron,” Rey hisses.

Poe looks positively thrilled with himself. He really is a little shit. “Ooh, someone's _touchy_.”

“I'm not touchy,” she snaps, and Ben smirks.

“You're right, Jackson,” he says sardonically, “how could anyone possibly think you're touchy when you're just so cool and collected?”

Rey glares at him. Ben practically basks in it, welcomes the way she straightens up, the way her lips part ( _the way they parted for his tongue, the way she gasped into his mouth, the way her fists pulled on his hair like she could hardly_ stand _it_ ). But then, before she can say one word, the entire lunchroom quiets down, each of them turning their heads to look at Leia at the front of the room.

Ben turns his head, too, just to follow everyone else's lead. He doesn't even hear what his mother is saying. He barely notes her announcements of where the different groups of teachers will be in the school for the rest of their professional development. He's too distracted.

Because he's too busy deciding that, yeah. He _definitely_ wants to have sex with Rey, if she gives him the chance. Just once, he tells himself.

Just once.

After thirty minutes, a length of time that seems to extend into eternity, Leia finally dismisses all of the teachers to their various destinations. Everyone at the table, save Finn, who will stay for the elementary ed PD being held in the lunchroom, gets up to stretch out their sore limbs and aching muscles before they head to their own little seminar locations.

Ben lingers, walking slower than he really needs to, letting Rose and Poe drift ahead, bickering amicably about the literary comparisons between Mars vs. Ares in ancient mythology and whether the Greeks or the Romans got the characterization right. Ben waits for Rey to pass him, and he falls into step beside her easily, unable to stop himself from noticing how nice she looks when she's walking so fast, her cute little hair buns bouncing as she moves.

God, he wants to tear her hair down. To know with it feels like threaded through his fingers.

Rey does not look over at him or acknowledge his presence until she mutters, “You are really giving the whole teen angst thing all you've got, huh? Where'd you get that shirt, Hot Topic?”

“It was my dad's, and Nirvana is basically classic rock at this point,” he protests, half-amused. “Besides, you're one to talk, you grunge girl wannabe. How and why do you know all these old groups?”

“I spent a lot of time at the library growing up,” she says, shrugging. Ben is almost shocked she actually deigned to answer the question; he halfway expected her to just run full tilt away from him. But she _does_ answer, and then she _keeps going._ “I volunteered in the children's section. I used to check out the CDs to listen to on the bus to school.”

“You were a dork,” he says appreciatively. “Did the bullies take your lunch money?”

She almost laughs at that. There is a sliver of amusement running through her voice when she replies, “I was the coolest girl in the whole class. Can't you tell?”

They're close to the doors at the edge of the lunchroom, where she'll go in one direction with Jannah and the rest of the specials teachers, and he'll go the opposite direction to the upper school. Ben reaches, skimming his fingers against the back of her arm, and she jerks, stopping her stride on a dime to stare at him.

She looks beautiful, he notices with a terrible lurch. In her shirt that he would bet any amount of money _she_ got from Hot Topic, and her painfully tight jeans, and her extremely unfashionable shoes. She always does. Look beautiful.

“We should talk,” he says, his voice quiet, his fingers still tracing the bone of her wrist.

She pulls her arm away entirely, tucking it behind her back. She can scarcely meet his eyes to say, “Not right now. Later.” And then she's gone, pushing through the doors to get away from him.

Ben thinks that's probably one of the calmest, most agreeable exchanges they've ever had.

 _Just once_ , he thinks as he walks through the doors after her. Baby steps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ But oh, god damn, if you wanted it, you would. ](https://youtu.be/tYG0Qp5uoGg)


	15. we are (not) friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YES i linked another car seat headrest song
> 
> the level of denial these two are on......we mere mortals could only aspire to it. also i hope u guys do not hate me for this chapter it is...slightly more intense than it probably should be

** 15\. we are (not) friends **

By noon, Ben is bored out of his god damn mind. It was inevitable. There’s only so long anyone can hold his attention, and by the third PowerPoint (this one about trauma-informed instruction, which Ben is pretty sure they’ve covered a good four times by now), he can feel his mind starting to drift.

This, as always, is where he gets himself into trouble.

He decides he’s going to blame it on Ackbar. If Ackbar were less of a droning, mind-numbingly bad speaker, Ben probably wouldn’t find himself fantasizing about Rey in the middle of his presentation.

It was inevitable, really. Unavoidable that he would think of her. _Not right now_ , she told him. _Later_. Later when, he can’t help but wonder. At the end of the day? Two weeks from now? Is _later_ one of those things women say when they really mean _never_?

There is no real reason for it, but he knows instinctively that Rey isn’t really the type for something like that. She’s too much of a straight-shooter; if she didn’t want to talk to him, he has no doubt in his mind she would’ve just told him that.

And it’s Ackbar’s fault, really, that Ben checks out mentally about ten minutes into the last (thank _god_ ) seminar for the day, and it’s Rey’s fault for promising him something so vague as _later_ , and it’s his own fault for being so— _so_ —

He doesn’t even know what to call it. It’s all tangled up in his head, between his ribs, in the pit of his stomach. He’s distracted, to say the least. Antsy. Borderline obsessed.

It’s a problem, is what it is.

Because he’s not really thinking about kissing her, or fucking her.

Well—he _is_. He _is_ thinking about kissing her: thinking of how he wants the chance to take his time with her, how he wants to pull every little sound and sigh out of her with his tongue, with his hands, meticulous and unrelenting. And he _is_ thinking about fucking her: thinking about what she’ll be like once she’s in his bed, how he’ll map out the landscape of her body with his mouth, how he’ll push into that tight little space between her thighs and take and take and _take_ everything she gives him, until she _begs_ him to make her come.

But: he’s also just thinking a lot about her voice. The way her mouth shaped his name with his teeth on her jaw. The way she always sounds so triumphant when she manages to get the last word. The way she laughs.

It is all deeply unsettling. He’s almost glad when Ackbar finally cuts through the fog that’s descended into his brain to remind them to fill out the survey on how helpful the training was before they leave to go do actual work in their own offices. Ben scribbles hasty circles over every single 5 on the chart. How was the pacing? Exceptional. How was the content? Exceptional. How was the speaker? Exceptional.

Ben is never so complimentary as when he wants to get the fuck out of something.

He slaps the paper face down on the desk at the front of the classroom all of the upper school counselors have been holed up in and takes off to his office, grateful to finally be free to finish his own work.

He’s even more grateful for the distraction it will provide. It was the boredom, he thinks, that drove him to daydream like that. He doesn’t think about people the way he was just thinking about Rey; it’s just not in his nature. He doesn’t daydream about a woman’s voice, even a woman he’s attracted to, and _especially_ not her. So it was the boredom, he decides. Nothing else to do but think, and brains are funny things. Always wandering off in crazy directions.

Fucking Ackbar.

He’s barely even walked in, barely sat down at his desk to power up his computer, when a sharp knock on his door interrupts his musings.

Ben doesn’t even have the time to say come in, scarcely has the time to draw his breath, before Rey is opening the door and shutting it swiftly behind her.

He can feel his jaw drop open. He snaps it shut with a click when she lifts her head to stare at him.

“The specials teachers finished early, and Poe wants a bunch of us to go to lunch,” she says carefully. “I told him I’d come get you while he and Rose choose a restaurant.”

Ben wonders if he has had a stroke. The only thought drifting through the empty expanse of his brain is: _oh, later meant now_.

He closes his hands on top of his desk, opens them again. Jerks his head to one side, a small shake to clear it. “That’ll take at least fifteen minutes.”

Rey nods steadily, and Ben gets the impression that that was the whole point. She takes a step into the room, and there is a big part of him that feels entirely preoccupied by the fact of the lock underneath the doorknob, the drawn shutters of his only window to the hallway. They’re alone, alone _together_. She takes another step, and he stands up automatically, feeling wound as tight as a spinning top: ready to go the fuck off.

They’re still separated by the length of the room, and there is still plenty of air between them, and yet—Ben feels distinctly like all of the oxygen has been pulled out of his lungs.

For a long moment, neither of them says a word. It’s a little discomfiting, but, oddly enough, not strange. Hardly even awkward. It’s just quiet. He takes the time to look at her, remembering...everything. The gentle curves of her body pressed against his, her breathless gasps, her hot, open mouth—

When they speak, it’s all at once, their voices overlapping, each of them slightly too loud for the space, words stumbling into each other.

Ben says, “I think we should try it again,” even as Rey tells him sternly, “It’s not going to happen ever again.”

There is a flash of disappointment that rolls through him like lightning, something fast and heated and ruinous, but he ignores it. How ridiculous, he chastises himself. It’s not like he expected anything else, after all. Instead, he smiles, nodding once. “Sure.”

And Rey looks so— _pleased_. So thrilled to be rid of him, so grateful he gave up without a fight. So he really can’t resist adding, with maybe just a tad too much sarcasm evident in his tone, “ _Whatever you say_ , Ms. Jackson.”

He thinks, momentarily, that perhaps there is something else in her expression, upon further reflection. He sees it in the moment right before it changes from that contented self-righteousness. He thinks it might be the faintest flicker of—dismay.

It’s gone before he can even tell it happened at all.

The pleasure slips off her face almost immediately, the moment the words pass his lips, and he sees that she was waiting for this. That she was waiting for a reason to be angry with him—like she was craving it. Like she _missed_ it.

Ben knows in that moment—knows exactly how much she's denying herself. How much she _wants_. Rey seems like the kind of woman used to wanting, used to never getting, used to giving and never taking. He can see it all in the spark in her eyes; he knows it the way he knows his own reflection. He sees it in her the way he sees it in himself. All of that desire, pure and untamed and unfulfilled.

He could give her so much. He could give her _everything_ she needs. Every little thing. He’s ravenous just at the _thought_ of it.

She folds her arms across her chest, cocking her hip to the side. “What exactly are you implying?”

He gives her his most even, plain, innocent smile. “Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” she snaps, clearly not impressed with his display of restraint. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m not getting at anything. You sound very sure it’s not going to happen again, so I am agreeing.” He takes a step forward, watching the way her eyes darken, the way her body sways like she’s resisting the urge to take a step—though closer or further away, he can’t quite tell. “It won’t happen again,” he says quietly.

Rey tilts her chin up, her fingers tightening on her forearms. “Good. It shouldn’t.”

Ben nods seriously. “You’re absolutely right.”

“It would be inappropriate,” she says, sounding suspiciously like she was waiting for the chance to tell him this, and he nods again.

“Definitely.”

“And ill-advised,” she goes on.

“You will hear no arguments from me there.”

“And we can’t stand each other.”

“All perfectly valid reasons not to do anything again.”

“Oh my god,” she bursts out, throwing her hands down at her sides, “will you stop that?”

Ben keeps his expression carefully innocent as he says, “Stop what?”

Rey looks on the edge of full-blown rage. “Stop being all agreeable!”

“Are you saying you want me to disagree with you?”

She blinks, seeming caught off her feet. “N—no.”

Ben takes another step forward. This time, the expression of her face is unmistakable. Unmistakably open. Raw. _Wanting_. “You want me to fight you about this.”

“No, I—I don’t. That’s—” Her breath is shaky, shuddering. “You are willfully misconstruing my intentions—”

“You _want_ me to give you all my reasons for why I think we should try it again,” he continues, his voice calm and dark as a body of water, hiding something in its depths, something lying in wait.

Rey does take a step back at this, jerking her head in the barest beginning of a _no_ , the gesture incomplete. “I don’t.”

“I think you do,” he continues, in that same even tone. “I think you want me to argue. I think you want me to give you a reason to change your mind.”

“I don’t,” she says in a squeak, then again, slightly more confident-sounding, “I _don’t_.”

“You sound very sure.”

“I am.”

Another step, and the space between them is halved. “Then why is your voice shaking?”

“Look, I didn’t—” She pauses, sucking in a breath that expands her ribs, letting out all of the air in an endless rush when she goes on, “I didn’t come here to argue about this, I came to tell you it won’t happen again.”

“What won’t happen again?”

“You know.”

He shrugs, feigning innocence, mocking.

She lets out a small sound of annoyance. “You _know_.”

“Humor me.”

She gapes at him. “We are not going to—” her voice drops, as if she’s afraid of who might be listening, “ _kiss_ again.”

“Why?”

“Because—I just _told_ you.”

“Humor me,” he repeats, his voice slightly darker than before.

“Because it’s— _inappropriate,_ and ill-advised, and we can’t stand each other.”

Ben looks at her, letting his eyes roll over every inch of her body. She squirms at the attention, and it’s lovely. So pretty, the way her curls fall across her cheeks, the way her pink tongue darts out to wet her lips. “A very good argument,” he says, almost gently. “Like a stool, right? Three legs to it? Did you practice that before you came in? Did you spend two weeks working on it?”

Her jaw is slack, her eyes wide with something that isn’t quite fear, just as it isn’t quite certainty. “Solo—”

“It’s weak,” he interrupts, shaking his head. “Vulnerable. Lame as a god damn duck. And what’s worse is you don’t even _believe_ it. If we were in court, I’d tear you to shreds.” He lowers his eyes to her mouth, imagining how easily he could press his lips there, how easily she’d bend for him—but no, he thinks. Not yet. Not until she tells him to. Not until she asks. “It wouldn’t be fair, really. Do you want to hear my counter?”

Her voice is barely a whisper when she says his name. “Ben.”

“Do you?” he presses, edging slightly further into her space. “Ah, you do. I’ll tell you, then. I think we should try it again. In fact, I think we should have sex.”

“ _What_?” she chokes out, her pretty features painted over with a lovely shade of red. Red, red, red, he thinks pleasantly. It's a beautiful color on her. He thinks every color is probably beautiful on her. She’s unfair, every single thing about her. Designed to torment, the sweetest torturer.

“Let me finish,” he murmurs in a voice dangerously soft. “I’m not done with the oral.” As he speaks, he advances on her, walking forward until there is little more than an arm’s length between them. “I think we should have sex for three reasons. One—” He hears her sharp inhalation as he inches closer, hears the way she tries to cover it up, and he resists the urge to smile, “because we are both unattached. Two—we both know it won’t go anywhere. And three—we are obviously attracted to each other. I think we should—to put it coarsely—fuck some of the tension out. Then, we can go right back to hating each other, and everyone is happy.”

“No, that’s—” he can see her swallow, _hard_ , see her eyes flutter closed for the briefest moment before she sets her jaw, “that’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because—” She raises her chin, crossing her arms over her chest again, as if for protection. “Because, _Solo,”_ she grits out, his name in her mouth like a filthy word, “your argument is inherently flawed. Because I’m not attracted to you.”

Ben smirks. “Really.”

“Really.” She sounds more certain now, huffing out her breath and rolling her eyes. “I’m not.”

He furrows his brow, pretending to consider this for a moment. “So why did you kiss me?”

“ _You_ kissed _me,_ ” she protests.

“Maybe the first time, sure,” he concedes. “Not the second.”

“I—it was heat of the moment. I was really angry and emotional and it just— _happened_. Nothing deeper than that.”

He lifts his eyebrows, doubtful, half-amused by her choice of phrase. “Nothing... _deeper_.”

She flushes even darker at the unnatural emphasis he puts on the word. “Yeah. _Yes_. So there’s no reason for us to—” She shakes her head, clears her throat. It's nearly cute, how she can't even say it. Pure and innocent as driven snow, as if he doesn't know precisely what she can do with her tongue. What she's already done to him with it. _Ruinous_. “There’s no reason for it.”

His eyes search her face, and she shifts at the attention, her own eyes flitting everywhere in the room but in his direction. “Alright,” he says eventually. “If you say so.”

Her shoulders relax a little. “I do. Say so.” She adds, after a second of thought, “I think we should just be friends,” and Ben nearly laughs out loud.

“ _Friends_ ,” he says, disbelief pouring out of him in waves. “ _You_ want to be my _friend_.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She makes a noise of frustration, as if _he_ is the one being difficult. As if she isn’t so steeped in denial he’s surprised she can manage to poke her head out long enough to talk to him about it at all. “Look, we’re never going to be able to avoid each other. We might as well try to get along.”

“So you want us to be...friends?”

She scoffs. “Maybe we can just settle for non-overtly hostile acquaintances.”

He shrugs. “Okay.”

“Okay?” He nods, and she lets out a small sigh. “Good.”

She begins to turn then, as if to open the door and walk away, walk out of his office, as if she has gotten everything she came for and wants to end this now, as if she has _won—_

But they aren't _finished_ yet. He's not done.

“And _Rey_ —” Ben takes a step into her, effectively closing the rest of the distance between them, and Rey jerks back to leave a scant few inches between their bodies, her spine hitting the door. He doesn't cage her in with his arms, doesn't even move to touch her; he doesn't need to. She's frozen, caught like a deer in the headlights. Her lips part, so plump and perfect, and it would be so simple, so _easy_ to seal the rest of that space, annihilate all of her pathetic arguments with a single kiss, show her the insanity of her claim that she doesn't want it—but he won't. Ben has never been a patient man, but he's willing to wait for this. For her to be ready. He almost welcomes it, almost wants to see how long it'll take before she comes crawling back to him, how much it'll take for her to _beg._ It’s _intoxicating_ , the idea of it. “To give you some peace of mind: when you’re ready—when you stop lying to yourself, when you come to me again, when you _ask_ me to fuck you—I won’t be so petty as to bring this up. It’s just in poor taste.”

She licks her lips, and he follows the swipe of her tongue with his eyes. _Perfect_ , he thinks again. He already knows the victory will be that much sweeter when she comes back. When she speaks, her voice is too quiet, too soft for the anger she seems desperate to convey. “I—”

He takes a step back, giving her some room to breathe. Himself, too—he feels dizzy from the prolonged proximity, drunk of the sight of her pretty mouth and her wide doe eyes and the citrus smell of her skin and the thought of what she'll sound like when she pleads for him to fuck her— “Yeah,” he says, in a voice low and dark, “you hate me, I know.”

She clears her throat, but her voice is still hoarse when she manages to say, “You're an arrogant bastard.” She sneers, her expression hard. “I will never, not in a million years, fuck you.”

He shrugs, reaching around her to close his hand around the doorknob. Every single second he spends in her space, he can feel her entire body tense, hear the way she's holding her breath as she moves away to let the door open. “Keep telling yourself that, Jackson,” he says. “Maybe you'll even start to believe it.”

He hears her sharp intake of breath, but before she can throw more vitriol his way he is opening the door, walking calmly out into the hallway to where Rose and Poe stand arguing at the end of it, their voices loud and overly intense while Finn and Jannah look on, both of them seeming both amused and bored.

“So, Dameron,” Ben calls as he approaches, listening to Rey's footsteps as she follows after him. The sound of it makes him grin, a smile of self-satisfaction. “What restaurant did Rose end up choosing?”

Rey makes sure they are sitting nowhere near each other at lunch, taking the furthest seat on the opposite side of the table from him. Her voice is loud, too enthusiastic and fast-paced; she laughs a little bit too brightly at Finn's jokes, smiles a bit too widely at Rose and Jannah. For the entire hour they are there, she talks to everybody but him. It's a good enough performance, one that he almost starts to believe after a while.

But then: her eyes drift over to him when she thinks no one is paying attention, always flickering back down to nothing when she sees him look, when she accidentally meets his unwavering gaze. And he does. Look. He fills his eyes with her; he listens to the sound of her voice, her laugh. He barely pays attention to his own conversations, only saying enough to avoid seeming so obviously enraptured.

Because it’s a _problem_ , he thinks, all of it is a problem—that he can't quite figure out how to tear himself away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Cute thing, don't be a rude thing. Hot thing, it was nothing. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj8H_ZXLgio)


	16. llama llama, mad at mama

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter does in fact involve an illness sweeping through the lower school but it has nothing to do with current events. i planned this before that started happening lol

** 16\. llama llama, mad at mama **

For three weeks, he doesn’t see Rey at all.

As in: _at all_ at all.

It's the longest he's gone without seeing her since they met. It feels pre-meditated. It feels _planned_. It feels like she is always walking around a corner when he steps into view, but he can't even see the flash of her heel to know if it's really even her. Like this is her answer to his, admittedly, less than elegant proposition. A resounding: _fuck no_. A reiterated stance: _never in a million years_. A sincere and heartfelt: _you really thought_ I _would come crawling back to_ you _?_

Around him, things continue to happen, as they do. College acceptances start rolling in, so Ben stays fairly busy with his older charges; Kyle improves, slowly but surely; Paige gives birth to a healthy baby boy (a week late, to both his parents' chagrin), and Poe takes advantage of the two weeks paid paternity leave offered by the school (or, really, just offered by Leia); Ben gets dinner with his parents, a dinner that he, for once, suggests; he replies to a seemingly heartfelt emailed apology from his uncle that had been sent to him at the end of November with four words ( _It's whatever, Uncle Luke_ ); and yet, somehow, the most important thing in all of this is the fact that for three weeks (three _weeks_ ) he does not see Rey _at all_.

It is crazy-making. Absolutely fucking annoying, beyond belief. By the end of the second week, he wants to tear the entire lower school apart to figure out exactly where she's been hiding herself, as if it is really even his business, because not seeing her is—it is—

Unendurable.

And Ben has no idea why.

It’s 5:30 a.m. when his mother calls. This fact is very important to Ben, and it is the first thing he says to her when he answers the phone with an annoyed grunt.

“I am well aware of the time, Benjamin,” she snaps, and Ben, god help him, actually straightens up in his bed, sans both his shirt and any scrap of dignity when his mother uses _the voice_ on him. She sounds genuinely frazzled, and that, in and of itself, is cause enough for concern. “I have a frightening number of teachers calling in sick in the lower school, and the contracting company we usually use doesn't have enough subs on hand to cover for all of them.”

Ben pauses for a moment. “Yeah? So?”

Leia lets out her breath in a long-suffering sigh. “Amilyn is one of them.”

It takes him less than a second to figure where she's going with this. He rockets upright, planting his feet on the ground as he drops his head in one hand. “No, no, no, you said I wouldn't have to do that again—”

“Ben, this is an _emergency_ ,” Leia insists, voice strained. “There's a stomach bug going around and the teachers—and the kids, for that matter—have been dropping like flies. I can't risk putting some unsuspecting sub in with Kyle, you know I can't, he's been doing so well recently—”

“I have work to do!” Ben protests.

“Ackbar's seeing your other kids are covered. Please. You _know_ I wouldn't ask unless I needed to. I had to pull two of the specials teachers just to make sure I could cover the second and third grade class—”

The words spill out of him before he can even think to stop them. “Which specials teachers?”

His mother is silent, for once. This is how Ben knows he really fucked up.

“Why do you want to know?” she asks eventually, suspicion obvious in her tone.

“No reason,” Ben replies, perhaps slightly too quickly. He clears his throat and winces. He decides to blame his apparent inability to relax on the early hour and heaves out a deep sigh, rubbing his temple with his thumb. “I'll be there,” he grits out, and hangs up the phone before she can ask him for any more favors.

The only other time he had to sub in the lower school was once last year, and it was nothing short of a nightmare.

It wasn't so much the kids, really. Actually, managing them was fairly easy. Kyle, of course, was a handful just by himself, but he liked having Ben in the room enough to behave himself for most of the day. The boys in the room liked him because he was tall and a man, both rare sights in the lower school, and the girls liked him because—Ben actually doesn't really know why the girls liked him, but they did. It's something about the way he speaks, he thinks, very flat and straightforward, nothing like the bubbly mannerisms of their usual teacher. He was a marvel, in their eyes, something new and exciting for the day, and they pretty much did whatever he told them to with minimal fussing, so Ben isn't particularly concerned about the kids.

Really, it was the _material_. Because Ben has not interacted with a child under the age of eight since he was a child under the age of eight, let alone taught one. It was embarrassing, really, how little he understood what they were learning, why they were learning it in the way the teacher had written it in her plans, and how to make them understand anything he was telling them.

The whole experience made him regret that time he screamed in his mother's face that she was a glorified babysitter. He had regretted it already, sure, but that day only solidified it in his mind.

Now, he has to go back and attempt it all over again, only this time with third grade, and—and _she_ will be there.

Well. Not _there_ there. In the same building. Possibly the same hallway. After she completely disappeared for three weeks.

Ben is...nervous. He does not like to admit to such a thing, but things being what they are—he’s nervous.

It only gets worse once he makes it into the school, a full thirty minutes earlier than he’d normally get there, and sees Rey the moment he gets to the third grade hallway.

She’s ahead of him, walking in the same direction, so he’s confronted with the sight of her hair bouncing in a high ponytail and the soft indent of her tiny waist and the swell of her ass in corduroy pants which, honestly, is a god damn _revelation_.

The sight of her almost stops his heartbeat completely. For a moment, Ben is convinced he has had some kind of seizure, because he loses complete track of why he is in this hallway in the first place.

She walks to the door next to Amilyn’s and pauses in front of it, fumbling with a key on a twisting spiral ring. She’s so focused on her task that she doesn’t notice that Ben is there at all until he is less than a foot away from her.

“So you’re one of the teachers my mother dragged into all this?”

She startles at the sound of his voice, settling her hand over her throat as she takes a shuddering breath. She mutters, “Good lord, you scared the daylights out of me.”

Ben smiles, despite himself, forgetting, briefly, that he is probably vexed with her for avoiding him. In reality, he's just glad for the chance to see her again—or for her to see him, actually, and realize he was right about their mutual attraction. “ _Good lord_?” he repeats. “You do know you’re in America, right? Are you going to say ‘bloody hell’ next?”

“You wish,” she mumbles in half-hearted irritation as she struggles with the key. “This blasted key won’t _fu_ —” Rey stops, taking a deep breath even as she jams the offending object further into the door, the entire lock groaning mechanically in protest. This girl. A startling deficiency of finesse. “It won’t fit.”

Ben lifts the key out of her hands, nudging her aside so he can work the door himself. He says quietly, “Did you just stop yourself from swearing? Is that why you’re talking like you’re a very committed extra in a _Harry Potter_ movie?”

After a moment, the door swings open with a twist of his hand. Ben grins down at Rey, though she is already glaring up at him.

“I _am_ from England,” she points out as she steps into the classroom. Ben lopes after her, idling by the doorway. He should probably be going over Holdo’s sub plans, but he shoves the notion from his mind when Rey continues, “If you really hate my accent that much maybe you can—”

“I don’t hate your accent,” Ben interrupts, furrowing his brow as she bustles around the room to find the folder of plans for the day. She carries it over to the desk up by the whiteboard, unsticking the edges so she can rifle through the papers inside. “It’s—nice,” he adds, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Cute.”

She raises an eyebrow, her eyes finally flickering up to meet his. “Cute?” There is a strange undercurrent of something that seems to border precariously on the edge of pleasure running through her voice. Ben figures it's likely safer not to read too much into it.

He smirks and shrugs his shoulders. “Sweet, even.”

Rey's mouth twists, and his eyes flicker down to watch the movement. “Look at you, Solo,” she says. “Making an undignified lurch in the direction of a compliment. Almost makes me think you were serious about that whole—” She lowers her voice, mindful of the still opened door. She’s always mindful of an open door, he’s noticed, only really tearing into him when they’re alone, just the two of them— “ _getting rid of the tension_ thing.”

She’s giving him an out, that much is obvious, giving him a chance to pretend he was just screwing with her about them hooking up. Ben should probably take it. It would definitely be the smart idea, to take it, considering the fact that they’re in a third grade classroom and she’s been avoiding him for three weeks and she’s clearly going to tell him no all over again.

He doesn’t take the out.

“I was serious about it,” he says from the doorway.

He sees the stutter in her movements that signify she heard him, but she doesn’t reply to the statement. Doesn’t so much as glance up, no matter how much he wills her to.

Instead, she asks casually, briskly, “You’re taking over for Holdo today?”

Ben nods, clearing his throat when he realizes she still isn’t looking at him. “Yes.”

She snorts and raises her eyes to meet his. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Her voice is all condescension; it is, unsurprisingly, extremely hot.

“No,” he says pleasantly.

A flash of a smile crosses her face, slanting up the corners of her mouth before she grimaces, raking her eyes over the paper held aloft in one of her hands. “Good luck then,” she says breezily, a clear dismissal.

Ben lingers for a moment longer, his head cocked as he considers her. He is trying to pinpoint the exact moment he stopped dreading their interactions and started seeking them out, looking forward to every stolen opportunity to make her blush. He can’t even tell when the change took place. Maybe when they kissed.

Maybe earlier than that.

But whatever, he thinks. It’s normal he’d want to put himself in the path of a woman he’s attempting to fuck.

He nods at Rey and spins around, walking back to Amilyn’s door with the set of spare keys dangling from his twitching fingers.

  
By mid-morning, Ben is cruelly reminded of every reason why he doesn't work with younger kids.

He attempts to decipher Holdo's plans for how to teach multiplication and is left hopelessly confused. The plans for her literacy block aren't much better, considering the fact that he doesn't have the first clue what a guided reading is, or what it should look like. He considers, for one moment of panicked insanity, calling his mother to come rescue him, but eventually he realizes he can just send them to their independent centers and pass out the practice pages left for him and the kids will, for the most part, figure it out themselves. He stays by the desk and walks a few laps around the room to see if any of them need help, but otherwise tries his best to just maintain order.

It isn’t terrible, really, once he settles into it. He definitely doesn't have the patience to put up with so many elementary age brats for more than seven or eight hours, but it grants him a new perspective on Kyle that he doesn't have the opportunity to see much. Namely, how he handles himself over the course of a day.

Not too badly, as it turns out. Ben feels proud of the kid, seeing how far he's come since this time last year. Second grade Kyle definitely would've tried to land a punch or two before lunchtime, but third grade Kyle seems to be...friendly. Sociable, even. Still quiet and withdrawn, but coming out of his shell. Seeing it eases a fear inside Ben he hadn't even really known he was carrying, a thin thread of concern for how Kyle will turn out, a worry that he'll turn out like—

Well. Like Ben. Even if he's finally got about half of his shit together.

It's not too bad a morning all things considered.

And then, at lunch, it actually improves.

Ben has no idea what teacher Rey is filling in for. He doubts he could pick her out of a crowd; he definitely doesn’t know her name. But by the middle of the day, he wants to thank God and Jesus and all of the saints for the fact that the unknown teacher and Amilyn Holdo appear to have the exact same schedule for lunch and recess. He has never been more grateful for the stomach flu in his entire life, including the time he got sick right before his first T-ball game when he was six and got to skip out on it.

They run into each other on the way out of the lunchroom. Rey raises her hand in a gesture of hello, smiling faintly, before she walks back down the hall. Ben almost calls after her to ask if she'd like to eat with him, feeling in his heart a kind of wild, animal quickening, but he thinks better of it at the last moment.

It’s not like he’s trying to _woo_ her, for fuck’s sake. That’s not what any of this is.

He sees her with her classroom outside afterwards, where fifty eight and nine-year-old hellions run screaming through the fenced in playground.

There is one adult-sized bench overlooking the sea of wood chips, and Ben takes a seat there almost immediately, preferring not to dirty his clothes trying to keep up with the kids. Rey, on the other hand, takes her sweet time making her way over to it.

She's one of those teachers who plays, he realizes watching her. She runs with the children; she joins in on their made-up games with inscrutable scoring systems; she mimes claws with her hands to roar like a monster while the kids squeal with delight; she chats about nothing with the more introverted little ones by the swings.

Ben finds himself watching her more than his own classroom, grateful for the sunglasses that hide where his gaze is drifting more often than not. He couldn't name the reason for it, so he doesn't. He lets himself watch her. He tells himself: this doesn't mean anything. This isn't a big deal.

Another quiet concession in a series of quiet concessions. He chooses not to think too deeply about that.

Eventually, Rey seems to wear herself out, skipping over to the bench to collapse on the other side of it, as far away from him as she can possibly be. That is to say: not that far, considering the width of the bench. He'd only need to scoot over a few inches for their knees to be touching.

Her chest heaves as she works to catch her breath. Her hair is mussed, cheeks pink from exertion, her smile so bright and easy it doesn't even disappear when she looks over at him, the way it usually does.

Her smile is what does it. What makes him say quietly, “You're really good with them, you know.”

She laughs gently. “Yeah, I know.”

A few months ago, he'd probably have sneered at her agreement with his compliment. Now, he's almost impressed at her simple acceptance of her own capabilities. He snorts, shaking his head. “Don't take it too much to heart, Jackson.”

“I promise, I won't.” She kicks her legs out in front of her, swinging them with her toes pointed up like she's one of the kids swaying on the swings. “You're not doing too terribly either. With them, at least,” she adds, sounding slightly reluctant to give him a hint of praise.

“In general, it's a different story, huh?”

“Yeah,” she says, her expression impossible to decipher, “something like that.”

She inches closer to him on the bench, turning her knees in his direction, and slopes her shoulders toward him. Her hand slides across the chipping red paint of the bench, nearly touching his leg.

Ben stops breathing.

“You know,” she murmurs quietly, biting her lip in a manner that is just on the wrong side of the awkward/seductive spectrum, “if that offer is still on the table—”

Ben realizes before she can finish her ridiculous advance. He lets out his held breath, scoffing to hide the sudden dizzying rush of adrenaline coursing through every extremity. “You're fucking with me.”

She bursts into laughter, unable to keep up a charade of flirtation for the single second necessary to sell him on the joke. “Don't curse, you know what they say about little pitchers.” Her eyes shift to look at his ears, her smile growing. “And their big ears.”

He runs a hand through his hair self-consciously, mussing it back into place. “You're a very poor actress,” he bites out, though there’s no heat to it.

“None taken,” she sing-songs flippantly, ignoring the fact that he didn't mitigate his insult with a _no offense_. “You can't say you didn't deserve it.”

Ben folds his arms, considering. “Maybe you’re right,” he agrees after a long moment. His eyes slide to her then, passing over her face. Her eyelashes are long and curled, making tiny shadows on her cheeks in the cool light of the cloudy day. She isn’t wearing mascara. He thinks she isn’t wearing any makeup, come to think of it. _Fuck her_ , he thinks once again, but there’s hardly any venom in it, even in his own head. “You were avoiding me,” he says haltingly, staring forward. There is a group of three kids standing by the monkey bars, vowing loudly that they are all best friends forever. “Right?”

“Just for a little while,” she says softly. “Just so you'd come to your senses on what a bad idea it would be.” The girl in the group of three has apparently changed her mind about her two male companions; she tries to whack one on the shoulder, misses her target entirely, and bolts across the playground while the other boy screams her name melodramatically. _Children_. “I was serious about what I said, you know,” Rey goes on while they watch the scene play out in front of them. “About being friendly when we have to see each other.”

He jerks his head in vague acknowledgment. “Not friends, though,” he clarifies.

Ben is not scared of the answer. He isn’t. He just—he doesn’t want her to say they're friends. He genuinely, sincerely, in the pit of his stomach, does not want her to call him her friend.

“Not friends,” she agrees adamantly, faking a shiver, and he feels relief roll through him at the reply, tempered with a slight offense taken at her feigned disgust. “You're too insufferable for that, and I'd rather not have a friend that wants to—” She waves her hand in an _and-so-on-and-so-forth_ gesture, rolling her eyes. “I told you it's not happening, Solo.”

Ben should be upset, considering the fact that she is, once again, rejecting him, denying there is anything between them. He would be upset, he thinks, if he didn’t get the distinct sense that Rey is bringing this up now, while they are in front of a group of children, because she’s afraid if they were anywhere else she might be more tempted than she wants to admit. “Fine,” he grants her, and can’t resist adding something he knows will drive her up a wall, “Whatever you say.”

She makes a noise of disgruntlement in the back of her throat, pursing her lips. “Jeez, you are—you are still _so_ frustrating.”

“Good thing we're not friends, then.”

“Good thing.” She stands up, dusting her hands off on her thighs, and calls out to her classroom that they need to line up. Ben watches the kids scramble into a line, all of them sweating through in their light jackets, hair plastered to their foreheads and cheeks bright red. “See you,” Rey tosses back to Ben, and she turns around to walk back with the line.

“It is, by the way,” he calls to her before she can walk too far out of hearing range. She glances back at him over her shoulder, her eyebrows knit together in confusion until he clarifies, “On the table, that is. If you’re ever interested.”

It barely takes her a moment to register his meaning. He can see the second it does, can see the way her eyes dart away and back again, the way her shoulders shake ever so slightly as she takes in a short, swallow gulp of air.

“That’s not necessary,” she says at long last. She lengthens her spine, tilting her head in a show of performative haughtiness. “I won’t be.”

She walks up the hill to the back entrance of the school with her group in tow, the chilly wind whipping through the strands of her ponytail like fingers caressing. Ben watches her leave, his eyes drawn, strangely enough, not to the curves of her body, but to the gentle slope of her nose in profile, the dimples in her cheeks as a blinding grin lights up her features.

Five minutes later, he gets up and calls to his own group of savages, pondering how he might get away with showing them that movie _Frozen_ until it’s time to go home.

At the end of the day, when Ben is driving back to his apartment, slightly worse for the wear and both grateful for and furious with Disney for allowing him to relax for the end of the day _and_ getting the song of an infuriating snowman stuck in his god damn head, his mother calls again.

He rolls his eyes when he sees MOM blink on his screen, but he answers the call anyway. Her voice on the other end is crackled, charged with static.

“How'd it go, honey? It was fun, don't you think?” She does not pause long enough for him to answer either question, continuing merrily, “Good preparation for when you start a family.”

Ben wonders idly if the old wives’ tale about eye rolling causing spontaneous paralyzation of the retinal muscles is true. If it is, he may be in trouble.

He ignores her badgering him about the state of his love life, or lack thereof, and says, “I have to sub again, right? That’s why you're calling.”

“Yes,” Leia sighs. “Looks like almost all the ones gone today will be out tomorrow, too. I was hoping it was a twenty-four hour thing, but no such luck.”

“Sure,” Ben grits out. “Fine. I'll be there.”

“Oh good,” she says, sounding relieved. “Thank you, honey! I love you!”

He can feel the tips of his ears turn pink, even though he’s alone in his car. “Love you, too,” he mumbles.

His mother hangs up first, and Ben tosses his cell onto the passenger seat, curling his right hand back over the steering wheel as he waits for the stoplight to blink from red to green.

He doesn’t even realize that he’s smiling until he catches a glimpse of himself in his rearview mirror, and the moment he does, he narrows his eyes and frowns at the reflection.

He is not happy to be back in the third grade tomorrow, he recites sternly. He is not happy for the off-chance that he will see Rey for thirty minutes at recess, surrounded by a somewhat large collection of babies. 

He repeats this again and again until he can say, within an acceptable margin of error, that he believes it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Let me lay waste to thee. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03hC_Ml8aAM)


	17. llama llama, time to share

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *cool young pastor voice* alright y’all it’s time to take it down

** 17\. llama llama, time to share **

Ben has never particularly understood the appeal of working with children, least of all the younger ones. He can remember what he was like at that age, too tall and awkward and embarrassingly honest. How he told stories about his parents’ marital problems to teachers in the middle of class, ignorant to the fact that they could even be classified as _marital problems_ , convinced constant arguing and fighting so loud the neighbors came to the door to complain was the norm for everybody. How he felt everything so strongly—like being angry, being alone. _Especially_ being alone, sitting by himself at recess in his own little world, using a magnifying glass he stole from his first grade classroom to try lighting ants on the playground ablaze with the light of the sun. How the one time he was successful he dropped the glass and cried because he didn’t like it, didn’t like killing something, and none of the teachers could figure out what it is he was so upset about. They had to call Leia in the middle of the day to leave her fifth graders to calm him down. A mess, that’s what he was. A mess. His father told him a few years ago that, until Ben was about seven or eight, he was nigh unintelligible, considering the stammer and the trouble with his articulation. Except, apparently, when Ben was screaming his head off.

 _Oh yeah_ , Han said, shuddering at the memory of it, _we all understood you just fine then._

Seeing the things he hated about himself as a child in others is, at once, strangely reassuring and the worst kind of deja vu.

 _It’ll take patience_ , Leia said when she first floated the idea of him working with Kyle last year. _Lots and lots of patience_. Ben was reluctant initially, anxious about what it would be like, going back to elementary school even in such a minor capacity, but he went anyway because it pleases his mother when he tries. And Kyle did take patience, but it was easier because Ben saw it the second they met—saw big dark eyes and unruly dark hair and a body that was too big for anyone’s comfort. When he walked into the kid’s second grade classroom for the first time, Kyle was screaming at the top of his lungs, crawling on the floor, his eyes wet and face bright red, and Ben thought, okay, _fair_. Sometimes it feels nice to scream that loud.

It took patience, but not so much as Ben thought. There was only one of Kyle, of course, and Ben had a natural affinity for him. It was easy to be patient when there was nothing else to do for their hour together but that.

All of this to say: elementary ed is not his wheelhouse.

The second day in Amilyn’s class is slightly worse than the first, but not by too much luckily. He just feels—wrong. Off, from the second he wakes up in the morning. Being in an unfamiliar room doesn’t help things by any means.

Toward the end of the morning, Ben has to restrain himself from losing his shit when one of the other boys in the room snatches Kyle’s scissors away when the latter is working on an art project, but Kyle handles the issue better than Ben would have at that age and just gets up to find another pair. When lunch rolls around, Ben feels tired all the way down to his bones, ready to get the hell away from all the reminders of childhood and back with the teenagers.

So, yeah. His patience? Stretched thin and fading fast.

By the time he brings them out onto the playground, he feels desperate for a chance to sit alone for thirty minutes, anxious for the time he needs to recover some of his sanity before bringing the classroom of hellions back inside and playing another movie for them. Not _The Emoji Movie_ , though, a monstrosity he heard about earlier in the morning that he had to subtly check his phone to see if it was real (it was, unfortunately)—he’ll play something that won’t make his brain rot out of his ears and then make him want to kill himself, in that order.

He expects a repeat of yesterday outside, for Rey to play with her classroom for a majority of their recess and eventually sit with him toward the end. However, when he brings his kids out and makes his way over to the adult bench, she’s already there, her face tilted up to the sun and eyes closed. Behind her, two girls from the room work on braiding her hair into two long strands, their high, childish voices blending together in a soothing white noise as he approaches. The children are an odd match: one blonde and willowy, her body stick skinny, the other dark-haired and small, her cheeks still rounded with stubborn baby fat. The blonde looks familiar, but Ben can’t quite place her.

He sits down on the other side of the bench, feeling a little like he is intruding on something. Before he can say a word though, Rey opens her eyes and meets his gaze, her mouth slanted in a half smile.

“Hi, Mr. Solo,” she announces in a voice unlike her own. Her teacher voice, he realizes, which must be why she’s talking to him instead of completely ignoring his existence the way he’s sure she’d like to. She glances back at her charges, jerking her head in his direction. “Tallie, Jess, look who’s here!”

The little girls giggle, the two of them sharing a look before they mumble a hello to him and go back to chattering excitedly with each other. 

They work on Rey’s hair slowly, painstakingly weaving thick locks over and under and over again. There is a row of three elastic bands on Rey’s wrist; he’s willing to bet she had her hair up in her standard three buns before the girls convinced her to let them run their hands through it.

Rey raises the hand with the elastics to her face, swatting stray strands of hair away from her cheeks, when the dark-haired girl abruptly stops, gasping aloud as she grabs her teacher’s wrist.

She turns Rey’s right hand over in hers, eyes fixed on the ring finger where Rey is wearing another piece of costume jewelry—a gold ring with a shiny plastic rose in the center of it. “Ms. Jackson,” the girl says, sounding near reverent, “are you married?”

Rey huffs out a short burst of laughter, the sound of it seeming like something nearly unexpected to her. “No.”

The girl frowns. “Then why are you wearing a married ring?”

“It’s not called a _married_ ring,” the other girl, the blonde one, corrects airily. “It’s called a _wedding_ ring. And it doesn’t go on _this_ finger—” she points to Rey’s right hand, and then to the left deliberately, “it goes on _that_ finger.”

“Tallie’s right, Jess,” Rey says gently, her lips twisted. “If I were married, I’d have my ring on my other hand.”

The girl, Jess, deflates, seeming put out. “Oh. Okay.”

“Jess doesn’t know anything,” Tallie adds, smarmy, and the other girl gasps again and smacks her on the arm.

“Hey, quit it!”

Rey turns and reaches, patting Jess’s shoulder gently. “It’s confusing, isn’t it? Remembering where everything goes?” She holds her hand out in front of her and the two girls, considering the ring. “I just wear this because I like it.”

“Can I try it on?” the blonde asks excitedly, bouncing on her heels.

Rey nods, twisting the band off her finger and passing it to the girls behind her so they can work it on their fingers. It’s too loose for their hands, but the girls fawn over it anyway, switching the ring from one knuckle to the next, passing it back and forth between them. Ben watches, feeling a quiet amusement at the way they hold the dinky little jewelry up to the weak sunlight, acting more grown-up than they have a right to.

He catches Rey’s eye, and she shrugs, eyes conspiratorial, mouth tight with contained humor. He’s one of the adults now, he realizes. He’s been an adult for a long time, supposedly, but usually it doesn’t really feel like it. He feels like it now, though, feels like he is someone to share a glance with, to look at over the heads of children, a mutual acknowledgment that they know things, the two of them, that the kids just wouldn’t get. Like they are on the same side, for once.

It’s not a bad feeling. Being the person she looks at like this.

The dark-haired girl frowns again, her eyebrows tilted together as she passes the ring back to its owner. She asks, “Why is it all rusted on the back?”

“My mom says that means it’s cheap,” the other girl says. The comment is clearly not intended to embarrass or insult; she speaks in the manner that children do, parroting something she’s heard before but never fully understood, too young to realize the weight of what she’s repeating.

At her words, Rey’s face falls, and Ben flinches. He hopes, for this little girl’s sake, she doesn’t remember this interaction when she’s older. He remembers, abruptly, how he knows her: the girl’s half-brother, Mark, is one of Ben’s current seniors. Tallie is the spitting image of Mark’s young stepmother, which explains just... _so_ much.

“It’s a pretty ring, don’t you think?” he says, interrupting before the girls can get too fixated on their teacher owning cheap jewelry. “I bet that’s why Ms. Jackson bought it.”

Rey nods, first at him, and then at the kids, seeming slightly relieved at the redirection. “Yes, that’s why I bought it,” she says. “Because I saw how pretty it was. I like to wear it for a little while and then I’ll get a new one.”

Tallie’s attention shifts to him suddenly, her voice tinkling and expression curious when she asks, “Mr. Solo, are you married?”

Ben tries his best to keep his expression flat and disaffected. He may or may not succeed. “No, I’m not married.”

“But why not?”

He shrugs. “I’m just not. Some people don’t get married.”

The two girls look like he just told them Santa Claus isn’t real, their faces twin expressions of pure, unmitigated horror. “ _Ever_?” Jess squeals.

“Ever,” he replies, nodding seriously.

Tallie straightens up, folding her arms across her chest. A queen bee in the making, it seems. “Mr. Solo,” she says purposefully, “you should marry Ms. Jackson.”

Ben laughs to cover the sudden pounding in his ears, hoping the rush of blood to his face isn’t visible. He feels faint, like he might topple over with a mistimed gust of wind. “No,” he says, barely able to hear his own voice, determinedly not looking over at Rey to see her reaction, “I don’t think so.”

“But why? She’s not married, so she needs a husband to buy her things.” Tallie addresses the latter half of her comment to Jess, the other girl nodding seriously at her friend’s sage wisdom.

“She doesn’t need a husband to buy her things,” Ben says. “She has her own money.”

“From where?” Tallie challenges.

“From work.”

“Where does she work?” Jess asks, all innocence.

“Here,” Rey finally cuts in. Her voice is bright with barely restrained laughter, and when Ben finally chances a look at her, she is already staring back at him, her expression deeply amused. “I get money for being a teacher.”

The blonde girl rolls her eyes and lets out a dramatic sigh. “You should still marry Ms. Jackson, Mr. Solo.”

Rey shakes her head severely. “No,” she says vehemently, then again, “no, no, we can’t get married.”

Tallie heaves out another, longer sigh, clearly displeased that the adults are not acquiescing to her extremely wonderful and logical plan. “But why _not_?”

“Because—” Rey pauses, her brow furrowed as she thinks. Her eyes flicker to his then, and Ben’s breath catches somewhere between his chest and his throat. “Because you should be in love to get married,” she goes on, glancing back to the girls meaningfully. “And we’re not in love.”

The kids are clearly not impressed with this reasoning. “I still think you should get married so he can buy you nice things—” Tallie begins again, but Ben cuts her off before she can continue on in her little plot to mortify them completely.

“Alright, girls, go play.” When they remain standing there, unmoving, he commands, less kindly, “ _Now_.”

That seems to do something, at least. The girls take off, running away from the bench to the jungle gym, probably about to regale their peers with their theories on why the two teachers on the bench should definitely get married. Ben wants to groan in frustration, but it seems highly undignified to do so, considering the ages of the two little pests. Instead, he settles for furrowing his brow behind his sunglasses and adjusting his posture on the uncomfortable bench, squirming with lingering discomfort.

Rey breaks the silence with a burst of laughter. Ben looks on as she giggles, the sound going on for longer than she seems to want it to, her shoulders shaking as she struggles to catch her breath.

Ben grins, letting out a small chuckle when she finally collects herself, her eyes still brimming with tears of laughter.

“Sorry,” she eventually gets out, her voice trembling, “I’m sorry about that. I promise I’m not trying to be your—trophy wife.” She can barely get the words out before she’s doubled over, pressing her forehead to her knees and laughing again. “I’m sorry,” she gasps when she sits back up, “I’m sorry, it’s just— _where do you work, Ms. Jackson? You need a husband to buy you things._ I felt like I was about to lose it.”

“Look,” Ben says, a ridiculous grin still stretched across his face, “I’ve met Tallie’s mom. Trophy wife doesn’t even _begin_ to cover it.”

Rey smiles at him, eyes shining, her laughter finally abated. “Still,” she says. “Sorry.”

For a moment, she just looks at him. And Ben is—looking back. And it feels like it did earlier, like they are sharing something, an experience perhaps, or maybe just the comforting knowledge that they are the _adults_ , that they both _get it_ , that they understand each other on that level at least. That level of: _look at how silly these children are, saying we should get married. Aren’t they just so young and innocent and heartbreakingly earnest? They are just so different from us two jaded grown-ups who know what it’s like to be in the real world, where we actually don’t get along at all, except for right this moment because of this shared understanding. Oh, those darned kids!_

Rey shifts in her seat on the bench and crosses her legs, a small smile flitting over her features as she looks out over the playground, then back to him. She says, her voice still light and good-humored, “So you’re never getting married, huh?”

Ben opens his mouth, closes it again. “Well,” he says. “Yeah. Why, should I not have told them that?”

She shakes her head, glancing away. “No, not necessarily. I’ve never been a big fan of making universal proclamations to kids like _you’ll get married when you grow up_ , and, honestly, you’re right.” She sounds half-irritated already at having to concede to such a thing. “The reality is not everybody does.”

He nods, accepting this logic, and adjusts his posture again.

Her eyes slide to his after a moment; she cocks her head. “I’m just wondering—why are you so convinced that you won’t? Get married, I mean.”

His eyebrows knit together. “Why are you asking?”

She shrugs, her voice wry, and lifts a hand to gesture _oh, nothing in particular_. “Small talk.”

“Small talk,” he repeats, obvious skepticism in the words, and she grins cheekily, like this routine is all old hat to her now.

“That’s what non-hostile acquaintances do, correct?” she says snidely. “Make small talk?”

“Correct,” he admits. “But that’s not really a small question, is it.”

“Let’s chalk it up to inexplicable curiosity.”

He stares at her for a long moment, and she meets his gaze steadily. “Fine,” he agrees eventually. “Alright. But you asked. So you can’t get all pissy with me if you don’t like my reasoning.”

Rey nods, agreeing to his terms, choosing to ignore the mild curse. “I asked.”

Ben sighs, raising his eyes to the gray, overcast sky. He always hates these kinds of conversations; he’s had the exact same one with his parents more than once, and they remain unconvinced. He doesn’t particularly feel like having it with Rey, of all people. Somehow, that makes it harder. “I’m not going to get married because it’s not worth the hassle,” he recites.

She lifts her eyebrows, disbelief already apparent in her expression. “The hassle?”

“Yeah.” He waves his hands in front of him, gesturing to— _everything_. “The whole thing. Date for two years, move in, get engaged, plan a wedding, have the wedding, live in misery, get divorced. I was in family law for a while, and trust me, it’s not worth the time, or the effort, or the money.”

“That’s assuming you get divorced,” she points out.

His response is clipped. “Yes.”

She’s silent, for a second, as if waiting for him to elaborate. “And why would you assume that?”

Another sigh, deeper this time. _Jesus_. A mess. “Because I’m going to,” he says flatly. “If I ever get married, I am going to get divorced.”

She lets out a sharp, hollow bark of laughter, clearly still unbelieving. “That is a bold prediction.”

He holds his hands out to his sides, palms open. “It’s my destiny.”

Her eyebrows rise further up on her forehead. “Your destiny.”

“Yes.”

“That’s pretty fatalistic.”

“No, it’s _realistic_. Some people are destined to get divorced, and I am one of them.”

He’s definitely not imagining the annoyance in her tone when she says, “What on earth would _possibly_ give you that idea?”

Ben squeezes his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand under his sunglasses, while the other curls around his elbow. He crosses his arms, staring out at the playground. He doesn’t know why he’s having this conversation, especially considering the fact that she hates him. He has no idea why she even wants to know.

“Look,” he begins, his voice almost too harsh. “I know who I am. I am a...difficult person. To be with. To be around. My old boss was on his fourth wife when I worked for him. On his fifth by the time I left. We are very similar people.”

“Similar how?” She sounds, oddly enough, genuinely curious. 

He rattles off the list. “Demanding. Selfish. Thoughtless. Unsympathetic.” He continues before she can respond, not wanting to see if she’d try to argue with him on his self-assessment. He knows she agrees with it anyway, and he’d rather not look at her to confirm it. “And besides that, there is a genetic predisposition.”

Her voice is flat with evident doubt. “ _Genetic_.”

“Yes,” he says again, frustrated. “My parents got divorced, my grandparents got divorced—” His grandfather, who was such a wonderful husband, such a loving father, until he wrapped his big hands around his wife’s throat and choked her until she passed out, and _kids get timeout but adults get jail time, we have a zero tolerance policy on violence, Ben, you_ know _that—_

“But your parents are married,” Rey says, sounding slightly confused.

Ben shrugs. “They split up when I was thirteen. Got back together when I was twenty-three.”

Rey is completely silent for a moment. The only noise comes from the space in front of them, happy screeches of too many children. The sounds of _you cheated_ and _that’s not how you’re supposed to play_ and _you can’t catch me!_ When he finally chances a look at her, she is pensive, her eyes searching his face like—like she sees right through him. “You think it was your fault,” she says, the words in her mouth like a dawning realization, like she didn’t even know it was true until she spoke it aloud and made it so.

“It was,” he says simply, and Rey makes a noise of obvious disagreement in the back of her throat.

“That’s the logic of a _child_ ,” she says, fervent. Overly invested. “You have to know it wasn’t you, you—you _have_ to know that.” He shakes his head, but she’s already beat him to it, continuing seriously, “They adore you. Your mother brings you up every chance she gets. Your father couldn’t stop bragging about you at Thanksgiving. You—you _have_ to know it wasn’t you.”

He just shrugs again; she makes the same noise of distress.

“My— _Ben_.” She pauses, waiting for him to look at her before she says, “ _My_ parents didn’t want me. Either of them. I know what it looks like.”

He looks at her evenly, aware that she doesn’t need another apology from him, or more pity. He says, “I know.”

“Did you ever consider the possibility that they stayed together for so long because of you? That they got back together because _they_ matured, not because you left?”

Ben blinks. Coming from her, from someone who actively dislikes him and therefore has no reason to make him feel better, it actually sounds—rational. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he dismisses. “I know if I ever got married, it’d be the exact same thing.”

She groans. “That’s _ridiculous_.”

“It’s just—why would I want to put myself through all of that? Why would I want to put someone else through it? I’ve seen it my whole life—divorce is a waking nightmare, _worse_ if you have kids. So I don’t need the hassle. I’d rather just take myself out of the game altogether.”

“Cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

He smiles faintly, the old adage sparking a memory of his mother standing at the door to his bedroom, her eyes serious and concerned. “That’s what my mother always told me.”

“She’s right.” Rey glares at him, seeming—not quite angry, weirdly. Even though this is just another one of their arguments, it almost doesn’t feel like one. Almost. “What if you’re wrong?”

He eyes her a tad bit warily. Her earrings today are hearts, big, red, translucent hearts. For Valentine’s Day in a few weeks, he’s guessing. He is thoroughly unsurprised at the knowledge of it. Rey Jackson: a romantic. “You want a family, right?”

She squares her shoulders, as if preparing to defend herself from his onslaught, whatever it may be. “I do.”

“Is that why you’re so offended I don’t want one?”

“I wouldn’t be offended if I thought you were telling the truth. But you aren’t.” She stares at him, and Ben is uneasy, _rattled_ ; he wants to tear his eyes away, cross the ocean of wood chips to leave her, but he can’t bring himself to move. He can’t remember the last time he checked on the kids. They could be burning a crude effigy of him in front of the slides for all he knows. “You’re just afraid,” she says, almost softly. “What if you’re wrong?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not wrong.”

“What makes you so sure?” she presses, her body leaning ever further into his, and _fuck_ , when did they get so close? He could count every freckle on her cheeks, if the impulse struck him. He could get lost in it. Lost in her.

He takes a shuddering breath, tilting away. It seems to make her realize it, too, how near they were, because she leans her spine back on the bench. “Because in my experience,” he says, not nearly as stern as he’d like to be, “everything does end. Badly. And I don’t want the trouble, I don’t _need_ it, and—Christ, I don’t—” He lets out a single bark of incredulous laughter, scrubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.”

He can’t believe himself, can’t believe he just had this conversation again, that it was with Rey, that she seemed for a minute like she cared about his answers. That it was on an elementary school playground in front of an uncaring audience of third graders.

He isn’t looking at her when she replies quietly, “Because I asked.”

Ben glances back at her again, his brow furrowed. “Why _did_ you ask?”

She seems just as unsettled as him, her eyes dim with disconcerted confusion as they flicker back and forth across his face. Like she is reading him. “I don’t know,” she murmurs after a long moment.

A breeze rolls through the air, and he shivers, wishing he’d brought a jacket outside. The wind whips through Rey’s hair, and Ben’s gaze shifts suddenly, caught by the loose strands buffeted around her head. The girls, it seems, did shoddy work—both braids came loose while they were talking, and Rey’s hair is down, waving gently over her shoulders.

He doesn’t realize how long he’s distracted until she mumbles nervously, “What are you staring at?”

He blinks. “Nothing,” he says quickly. “Nothing, I just—I just realized I’ve never seen you with your hair down.”

She chuckles, sounding a bit unsettled. Off-center.

Ben feels off-center, too, dizzy. Almost sick.

“Yeah,” she says, sounding valiantly casual as she combs her fingers through the light strands. Ben is—transfixed. Stuck. “Guess not. I don’t like having it down, it just kind of hangs there.”

Her hands are quick, deftly whipping her hair into a long rope, twisting it in a spiral on the back of her head. “No,” Ben says hoarsely, and clears his throat. “It’s—it looks good.”

Rey grins. It isn’t quite as easy as before. She peels one of the elastics from her wrist and tugs it around her bun, saying, “Oh, look. Another haphazard stumble towards something complimentary.” She’s reaching, that much is plain, like she’s searching for a good reason to be annoyed with him. “You’re very persistent.”

Ben watches as she stands up. There’s this feeling in the pit of his stomach that is almost like nausea, and he doesn’t know what it is. “Yeah,” he says distantly. “You got me.” His voice sounds far away from him.

She makes a show of checking her watch, and she stands up, calling for her kids to make a line. Ben watches, frozen to his seat, and he doesn’t say a word.

She calls back to him as she walks away, “I’ll see you around, Solo,” but she doesn’t look at him to make sure he heard her. She walks back up the hill to the school, a long line of children trailing after her.

The feeling in his stomach doesn’t go away the entire afternoon. Through the duration of _The LEGO Movi_ e, for the final bell, for the walk to his car in the lot. There is something wrong with him, he thinks, something has to be _wrong_.

He runs through it over and over again in his mind, picturing her expression, so fierce, her voice telling him he was afraid, and _we’re not in love,_ and her nearly green eyes, the sun dappled over her tan skin, the sound of her laugh—

Ben thinks of it the entire drive back to his apartment, the feeling in his stomach growing and growing. He feels strange. He feels wrong. He feels like he’s going to be sick.

Oh, shit—he feels like he’s _actually_ going to be sick.

Ben makes it back home with barely enough time to park his car on a truly horrible diagonal in his space in the lot. He makes it two steps before he’s doubled over, heaving. He throws up on the blacktop, his throat burning with acid, and thank fucking god, holy fuck, this explains _everything,_ Jesus Christ.

He almost smiles, and then his stomach roils and he vomits again.

“Hey, man.” Ben look up to see one of his neighbors, an older man he’s never talked to, staring at him from three cars over, his expression both concerned and disgusted. “Are you okay?”

Ben grimaces, his hand clutching his abdomen, and waves the man away.

“Fucking _kids_ ,” he explains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Give up your secrets, and let down your hair. ](https://youtu.be/yWLasUfJnWs)


	18. inch by inch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen......,,,,i have been watching succession.........kendall roy just made my list of top fictional sad rich boys........that’s all

** 18\. inch by inch**

Ben doesn’t get sick very often, least of all with some kind of child disease. After the two days in the lower school, he is forced to take Friday off of work and spend the weekend recovering in his apartment, stumbling from his bedroom to his bathroom and back again. On Friday morning, his mother gets him a curbside delivery of chicken broth, saltines, and Sprite; on Saturday, Poe texts him that he should have been more careful about washing his damn hands.

 _Those little heathens are germ factories you idiot_ is the exact message. Ben messages back: _Don’t you have a fucking baby to keep alive_.

Ben spends the weekend alone, recovering from the worst sickness he’s had in the entirety of his adult life and, perhaps even worse, reliving every single moment of his conversation with Rey on Thursday. How much he told her, the words spilling out of him uncontrolled. How _weak_ he was. How pathetic he must seem to her.

At least, he thinks, it only happened because he was getting sick. It’s cold comfort though; he hates every single minute anyway.

He goes back to work on Monday and vows that he won’t be caught off guard by her like that again. It was only the stomach flu, really, and the cold snap outside, and the fact that her hair was down. He won’t be weak like that again.

He is only mildly concerned that this will turn out to be a lie.

Ben is never so grateful that he works in the upper school as he is the week before Valentine’s Day, truly the most heinous of greeting card holidays. The entire lower school is plastered with hearts and smiley faces and pinks and reds, and Ben cringes every time he has to make his way over to Kyle’s classroom.

He sees Rey that week, once or twice (three times, he knows it’s three times, who the fuck is he trying to kid?). Each time, one of them is on their way to something ostensibly important, so he has no time to backtrack how stupidly open he was on the playground and assure her of how calm and normal he is (in addition, and more importantly, he has no time to remind her of the fact that they should have sex). Each time, she grants him the barest of half smiles, a minute wave of her hand as she passes him by, and he returns both, hopefully to a slightly lesser, cooler degree than her. Each time, she is wearing red—a red blouse with white buttons, a red scrunchie in her hair, a dangerously short red skirt. That last one almost causes him to walk into the wall when he sees her, but he’s pretty sure he manages to play that off decently well.

Poe gets back from his leave the same week and insists they eat lunch together on Friday to “catch up,” which is code for Poe bragging about his brand spanking new spawn. Ben agrees because, hey, why not. It’s not like he has anything better to do.

They go to Ben’s office, because he doesn’t have to share an open-concept desk space with the entirety of the language department, and eat In-N-Out while Poe moans around his burger like he’d rather fuck it than eat it. Ben watches in muted horror.

“Please make less explicit noises, Dameron,” he finally says after a particularly unsettling sound.

“I will not,” Poe says, grunting slightly. “You know I’ve been avoiding junk food in solidarity with Paige. Well, the baby is out, and I am a free man once again, and you will _not_ ruin this for me.”

Ben snorts. “You’re whipped.”

Poe grins. “I really am.”

“How is your progeny anyway?”

“Wonderful,” Poe says, effusive. “Fantastic. The greatest baby that ever lived.”

“Liar.”

“Believe it or not, I’m actually not lying. Paige even got worried the other day that he’s _too_ good.” Poe shrugs, devouring half his burger in one horrific swallow. “She refused to calm down until she could talk to one of her OBGYN friends from med school, who basically just said she should stop bragging about how cool her baby is.”

Ben watches his friend talk through his food, wincing at the sight. “That does sound extremely on brand,” he says.

“Yes, exactly,” Poe acknowledges. “But no, he’s great. A very easy baby comparatively. Guess that extra time he spent cooking helped him chill out a bit upon entry.”

Ben nods. “That’s good to hear.”

“Yeah. Jesus, that was a nightmarish nine days. But now—” Poe holds his arms out wide, like a showman announcing the next part of his act, “Jamie is _here_ , and he truly is the greatest baby that ever lived.”

“Really.” Ben raises an eyebrow, expression flat as he digs into his fries. “The greatest.”

“Fuck yeah,” Poe says loudly. “Kid is gonna be fluent in three languages. Three! How many do you know? That’s right, one, like a sad Caucasian baby with monolingual parents. When he grows up, my son will crush you in any measure of skill.”

That manages to startle a grin out of Ben, and Poe smiles wide, always pleased as anything when he manages to garner a reaction. “Alright, Dameron, calm down about the baby.”

“I just can’t help it,” he says, and he sounds so serious for a moment, so genuinely happy, that Ben almost feels like he’s intruding on his own conversation. “Jamie is...the _best_. He’s my favorite thing ever. Paige is a close second, of course.”

Ben’s mouth slants in a light smile. “I’m happy for you, man.” And he’s not even being sarcastic, even if he’s congratulating Poe on the non-accomplishment that is fathering a child. Maybe this is what growth feels like.

Poe’s smile grows. “Yeah, thanks, Ben.” He crumples his food wrappers in two hands, shoving the entire thing into Ben’s little trash can by his desk. Great, Ben thinks; now his entire office will smell like fast food. Poe turns his attention back to Ben, eyes bright and hands splayed to his side as he asks, “So what’s up with you, man? What did I miss?”

Ben shrugs.

“Nothing? Really?”

He shrugs again. “Nothing of any import,” he says.

Poe nods, seeming thoughtful, and stretches his legs so he can tip onto the two back legs of his chair, maintaining his balance through what appears to be sheer force of will. “So you haven’t sealed the deal with Rey yet, huh?” he says, apropos of nothing. 

Ben almost chokes on one of his fries. He coughs into his elbow and wheezes out, “What?”

Poe holds his hands up by his shoulders, palms out. “Let me just say, I’m profoundly unsurprised. You’ve never been a good closer.”

“I have no idea what you’re even _talking_ abou—”

“Jesus, Ben,” Poe laughs. “You’re a godawful liar. You should get a fucking...mask or something, I don’t know.” He puts one hand over his face, moving it around as if to symbolize the mask Ben apparently needs. “It’s those big puppy dog eyes, they give you away every damn time.”

Ben coughs one last time and straightens up, affecting an air of deliberate unconcern. “I’m not trying to ‘close’ anything with Rey,” he lies, like a liar.

Poe stares at him evenly, eyebrows tilted together. “Solo. Please. It’s me.”

“So?”

“So: you’re clearly into her.”

“I’m not into her,” Ben scoffs.

“Ben, you could be accused of being a great many things, but _subtle_ is not one of them. Now, to be fair, with the baby distracting me it took me an embarrassing amount of time to put it together—”

“There’s nothing to put together—”

“Yeah, right,” Poe says, in obvious disbelief. “You just gaze longingly at everyone in the middle of staff meetings.”

“I wasn’t—I don’t _gaze_ at her.”

“Ben, you are just digging yourself into a deeper hole with every single syllable.” Poe shifts on his chair, letting the front legs come back on the ground with a thud as he adjusts his posture to one better suited for his particular style of teaching. That is to say, any young, male teacher's style of teaching: an affect of cool understanding, tinged with a whiff of desperation to seem _with it_. “I present to you, the evidence.”

Ben rolls his eyes. “ _Evidence_ —”

“Exhibit A,” Poe interrupts with a flourish, “gazing—”

“—do not _gaze_ —”

“— _longingly_ during staff meetings, don’t interrupt, please, Benjamin. Exhibit B: Paige said you were dancing with Rey at her birthday—”

 _God damn Paige_. He sputters something that ends up coming out as, “ _Barely_ qualifies as dancing—”

“Benjamin,” Poe cuts him off, snapping his fingers in a manner that makes Ben want to throw him through the wall, “I’m not done. And exhibit C,” he finishes, “perhaps most damning of all: that time you demanded to know when the lower school ended their day and then sprinted to the parking lot because you were afraid you missed her before the break.”

Ben frowns in some strange combination of fury and embarrassment. Maybe he _should_ look into getting a mask of some kind. “That—that wasn’t about—”

“Oh, what was it about then?” Poe crosses his arms and waits. Ben’s frown deepens. “Hm? No answer? I thought not. You’re into her, and I want to hear you admit it.”

“I’m _not_ into her.”

Poe makes a dumb little _pshaw_ sound. “I’m so sure.”

Ben tips his head back to the ceiling, screwing his eyes shut. “I—maybe I am...interested,” he ventures slowly. “In a strictly physical sense.”

Even without seeing him, Ben can feel the doubt rolling off of Poe in waves. “Physical,” Poe repeats.

“Yes. But that’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“Yes,” Ben snaps, finally daring to meet Poe’s stare, hoping his brief chance to regroup allowed him to fix his own traitorous facial expressions, “and I’d appreciate if you didn’t sound so obviously skeptical.”

“Oh, sorry, did I only sound skeptical?” Poe cups his hands around his mouth in a megaphone shape and chants, “You are lying, you are clearly into her.”

“I’m not! I can’t—” Ben stops, letting out a sound of pure frustration. “I can't even stand her.”

Poe pauses, seeming to turn this over in his head. He steeples his fingers under his chin in a parody of thought. “Ben,” he says, in a very annoying tone of voice, “now I will be the first to admit that I am no scientist—”

Ben lifts his eyes to the ceiling, scoffing, “Right, I seem to recall you asking me what the difference is between atoms and molecules—”

“It’s confusing, okay! _Anyway_ ,” Poe says deliberately. “Anyway. I do know how magnets work.”

“Untrue.”

“And how magnets work,” Poe continues, undeterred, “is that they have two sides, right? And if you put the two sides together the wrong way, they won’t go together. Like there’s an invisible bubble between them. And the stronger the magnets are, the more they push each other away.”

“They repel,” Ben sighs heavily. “The word you’re groping pathetically for is _repulsion_.”

“I bet that’s what you thought it was, right?” Ben is silent, which, of course, Poe takes as tacit permission to continue in his obvious metaphor. “But then,” he says, leaning forward intently, “if you flip the magnets around—”

“I think we all understand the rest,” Ben says sharply. 

Poe leans back, apparently satisfied he got his point across. “Jesus, Ben, why don’t you just ask her out?”

Ben shakes his head, feeling slightly childish as he does. _God_ —what has become of him? “I don’t want to ask her out,” he says petulantly.

“Why not?”

“Uh, a _ton_ of reasons.”

“Oh really? Tell me.”

“What? Why?”

“Give me your reasons,” Poe insists, folding his arms, “so I can show you how fucking lame they are.”

Ben’s lips churn, his back molars grinding to dust. “Fine,” he bites out. It doesn’t take him long to pull up his list. He knew he kept track of the _whys_ for a reason. “She’s twenty-three. Basically a fucking coed.”

“Weak,” Poe jeers. “Your parents are ten years apart. Next.”

Ben furrows his brow. “We’re coworkers.”

“ _Barely_. Next.”

“We don’t get along.”

“Because of magnets. Next.”

“She hates me.” There might be some bitterness in the words; Ben will chalk it up to residual embarrassment over how thoroughly ridiculous he was the last time they spoke.

“Be nicer,” Poe tells him, almost a command. “Change her mind. Next.”

Ben crosses him arms now, mirroring his friend. As if this is their high noon, their Mexican standoff: a conversation about whether or not Ben wants to go out with some elementary school art teacher. This, unfortunately, is his life now. “She’s the type who wants commitment, and I don’t want a girlfriend.”

“A lie. Next.”

“Poe.” Ben waits for the other man to meet his eye. “I don’t,” he says, expression stony. “You know me. I don’t want a girlfriend.”

Poe, when he speaks, is quiet, almost gentle. “You don’t want to want a girlfriend,” he says, mouth slanted ruefully. “There’s a difference. Next.”

Ben groans, frustrated, and tears a hand through his hair before gesturing to nothing at all. “She wants a family, and I don’t.”

“I think we both know that isn’t true. Just because your family is fucked up—”

“Understatement of the _year_ —”

“—that doesn’t mean you can’t have a family of your own. Look, I was single for a long time before I met Paige. A _really_ long time. And you know what? I didn’t really mind it. I _liked_ being single. I liked living alone, having my own space, being in charge of my own time. Being a bachelor is fucking fun. I wasn’t beholden to anybody. Nobody could ever be disappointed in me.” Poe holds Ben’s eyes before he continues, like he needs for Ben to see. Like he is bestowing upon Ben some ancient fucking wisdom. “Nobody could ever hurt me either.”

Ben waits for a long moment, before realizing Poe expects audience participation. He sighs. “But?”

Poe grins, pleased. “ _But_. I met a great woman. And she was smart and funny and not afraid to kick my ass, and I realized—what I liked even more than being single was being with someone like her. And all the reasons I had for being alone just seemed kind of...I don’t know. Silly, after that. Because, okay, being with Paige? Is way better than anything else.” Poe's eyes do not waver from him. Ben is the first to look away; he only hears Poe say quietly, “Next.”

Ben’s eyes are trained on the floor. He shrugs one last time. “I’m not into her like that,” he mutters lowly. “I’m _not_.”

Poe chuckles, and he rocks back on the chair again. “Yeah, okay, man,” he says. “Keep telling yourself that.”

Ben frowns, his hands clenching into fists. He kicks his foot against the front leg of the chair and watches, satisfied, as Poe crashes to the ground with an undignified yelp.

That, at least, makes him feel slightly better.

He sees Rey the fourth time that afternoon. It’s strange, running into her right after his conversation with Poe. Like it is a message from the universe, only Ben can’t tell if the message is _STOP TRYING, YOU IDIOT_ or _YOU ARE DEFINITELY GOING TO FUCK HER_ or something else entirely that he can’t quite pinpoint. It’s dizzying.

It’s because of the rain—Ben is trapped under the awning at the front exit, staring out at the parking lot, angry with his past self for leaving his umbrella in his car and also for not checking the weather in the morning the way he usually does. Rain isn’t often a particular concern of his, for obvious reasons, but today it has clearly decided to wreak vengeance on all the complacent California natives. He can hear the rain thrumming steadily overhead, and he knows the minute he steps out under the open sky, he’ll be drenched. Ben is just standing there and looking out over the lot, delaying the inevitable, when he hears the door behind him open, hears it shut, and hears a, by now all-too-familiar, groan of distress.

Ben turns to see Rey standing in front of the door, her expression pure animal rage as she glares at him. Like the weather is under his control, and he is doing this specifically to fuck with her.

He holds his hands up in mock surrender. “Don’t look at me. I had nothing to do with this.”

“Wouldn’t put it past you,” she mutters, folding her arms across her chest as she steps out of the way of the doors. Behind her, a few teachers from the upper school stream out with umbrellas held aloft over their heads. Ben wonders why she doesn’t try to hitch a ride with one of them. More importantly: he wonders why he isn’t trying to hitch a ride with one of them.

Ben offers her a flash of a grin, which she, insanely, returns. “Weren’t you supposed to get out like an hour ago?” he asks.

She nods, her attention fixed on the downpour, her eyes tracking the rivers of water rushing down toward the bottom of the hill. “Usually,” she says. “I stayed back for a bit to reorganize my atelier. Now I’m starting to regret that.”

“I would think you’d be used to the rain. Being from England and all,” he rushes to explain, not wanting to seem like he gave this any measure of _thought_. “Living in those flyover states.”

“I am used to it. Doesn’t mean I enjoy it.”

He glances over at her, knitting his eyebrows together. “You don’t like the rain?”

She sighs heavily, shrugging one shoulder. “It’s damp and miserable and sad,” she murmurs quietly, “just like home. I like the weather here. Warm and dry.”

He lets out a puff of laughter, shaking his head. “Warm and dry means fucking...wildfires and drought and heatstroke. We’re in a desert.”

She shrugs again, this time with both shoulders. There are strands of chestnut hair tugged loose from the braid curled around her head at the back of her neck, at her temples. Ben is caught by a strange impulse to twist one of the locks through his fingers. “Maybe,” she admits, and his attention snaps back to her face when she looks at him, her mouth twisted in mild humor. “But it’s prettier here.”

It takes him a moment to find his voice. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Pretty.”

For a moment, she seems struck. Her lips part, her eyes widening a fraction—and then she looks away, jerking her head to the lot.

Ben looks at her for a moment longer, and he shakes his head, half-irritated with himself, but mostly with Poe. _Gazing_. “Are you going to make a run for it?” he asks, and she grins.

“That was the plan. Why, do you have a better idea?”

He nods, letting a small smile grow on his own face. “I have an umbrella somewhere in my car,” he tells her, “let me get it and walk you back over to your...vehicle.”

Rey lets out a bark of laughter. “Is that another crack about my car?”

“I’m not sure you can call it that, legally-speaking.”

She laughs again. “Bite me.”

“Happy to.”

The smile slips off her face. Ben watches as her cheeks color, the movement of her fingers as her hand slides up through the errant curls of hair at the nape of her neck. He wonders if she’s remembering it too: the skin of her throat under his teeth, in his mouth. She’d tasted nice, fresh and clean, the slight bitterness of salt. He isn’t lying—he would be happy to bite her again. There. Other places. He’d do a lot more than that, if she’d let him.

Rey inhales sharply, easing a nonchalant smile onto her features that seems more than a little forced. “If you went and got your umbrella, you’d get soaked. What’s the point?”

“Least one of us stays dry.”

“No, you don’t need to—”

He shakes his head firmly. The doors behind them have stopped opening and closing, most of the teachers already having braved the rain to go home. His car and Rey’s are two of the only ones left in the lot. “I’m going to have to go through it anyway,” he says, exceedingly casual.

Rey looks at him calmly, her eyes bright. “Fuck it,” she says, and that’s the only warning he gets before she takes off into the downpour.

He calls, “Rey!” but she’s already halfway across the lot, getting drenched to the bone. Ben groans, and then he runs after her.

He catches up to her when she skids to a stop in front of her car, and he walks closer while she struggles to fit the key into the door. Christ, she could really use a fob for that; she has some insane inability to open locks, it seems, due to the fact that she prefers to bludgeon things into working according to her will.

“Jesus,” he says, and she spins around, her expression alight with rampant amusement even as water pours over both of them, spilling down her eyebrows and into her eyes, dripping off the point of her chin. “You could’ve waited five minutes.”

She swipes her hand over her face, grinning widely despite the storm. “I don’t need an umbrella. Like you said, I’m used to it.”

“What are you smiling at?”

She giggles, and it makes something trill in his chest like a little cartoon bird. _Ridiculous_. “Nothing,” she says around her laughter, “nothing, you just—your hair just looks—so, _so_ stupid right now.”

Ben winces, and he combs his fingers through his hair, trying to pull it away from his forehead to tuck behind his ears. “You’re one to talk,” he shoots back. “You look like a drowned rat.” She doesn’t; she looks irritatingly adorable: wet, bedraggled clothes, water pooling in her clogs, hair tangled up around her head, and all. But she doesn’t need to know that.

“Jerk,” she says, without heat, and he smirks.

“Baby.” It’s not a pet name; he’s calling her a baby to be mean, the way a so-called big kid would. That's definitely all it is.

She laughs again, or maybe she never really stopped. “Why are we still standing out here?”

He might be smiling. There's really no way of knowing. “I don’t really know,” he says, and she cocks her head as if considering their current predicament.

She says, “I guess I can’t get any wetter.”

She seems to realize her mistake right as she says it, her mouth opening in mild surprise, her eyebrows lifting. She looks like she’s been playing a game with him, like this is something she thought herself an expert on, like she got cocky, made a mistake, and realized, too late, what a fucking disaster she’s walked into.

He sees all that in her face even before he steps close to her and replies, in a voice gone low and soft, “Yes, you can.”

Rey stares at him. For a moment, he thinks he sees her features changes, rearranging into something that might be interest, the way she’d looked at him nearly two months ago, right before she kissed him—but it vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

She leans onto her car, and he hears the click of the lock opening as her key finally shifts into place. Ben backs up, letting her haul the door open. He doesn’t take his eyes off of her when she steps into the car. Not even when he puts his hand out to hold the door open and ducks his head closer to hers. He murmurs softly, “See you around, right?”

Rey looks at him, and there is something glinting in her eyes that makes every thought flee from his head. “Yeah,” she says, after a long moment, the corner of her mouth lifted in something that could be a smirk. It makes something tighten in his gut, hot and coiled. “See you around.”

He backs up enough to let her close the door, lifting his hand in a moderately enthusiastic wave as she backs up and drives out of the lot.

Ben trudges back to his own car, where it was parked up closer to the school building, still grinning slightly. As he does, the sky opens up and, as hard as it was raining only moments before, the downpour lightens and lightens until, finally, it stops altogether.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I’m a lot like you, so please: hello. ](https://youtu.be/JJghf2OcW1s)


	19. everywhere babies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is not too long and doesn’t have very much reylo at all BUT it does come right before what will either be one super long chapter or two longish chapters that will have MUCH reylo (although i cannot reveal at the moment how much) so i hope you will forgive me!!!!!
> 
> also i upped the chapter count again lol. it may go up again who knows!!!

** 19\. everywhere babies**

There are only so many pictures one can view of a newborn infant before it becomes startlingly apparent that all babies look like creepy little aliens. Ben’s limit, it seems, is somewhere between one picture and one million.

The entirety of February and the beginning of March is like that, it feels like. Jamie smiling! Jamie gurgling! Jamie clapping his fat little hands together! Jamie lifting his head during tummy time! Ben humors Poe’s obsession, but only reluctantly, and only because Poe, somehow, is his best/only friend. Mostly, he does his best to subject change when the baby comes up. Which he does. Come up, and often. The baby, that is. Even during conversations in which it doesn’t make sense to bring up his son, Poe somehow manages to work it in there anyway.

It is—to put it delicately—super fucking annoying.

Even if Ben seems to be the only person who feels this way. At the staff meeting at the end of February, Poe shows off what feels like seventeen interminably long videos (fucking _videos_ ) of his son, to the sounds of little breathy sighs and _aw_ s of adoration from his captive (in the most literal sense of the word) audience.

Jannah squeals. Finn smiles happily. Rose and Rey actually coo—real coos, like the sounds made by a flock of feral pigeons about to descend on a scattering of breadcrumbs. Ben rolls his eyes and tries not to lose it.

Although: there is a moment, when Poe is showing on what must be the fortieth picture of Jamie being bathed in the sink ( _because! his little dimpled knuckles! his soft, downy, wild hair! his little baby rubber duck!_ ), when Ben snorts aloud at how utterly cliched his friend has become, despite the fact that together they used to make fun of parents like this, and, across the table, Rey glances up and catches his eye before he can school his expression into blithe disengagement.

She meets his gaze, grins, and rolls her eyes. Almost as if she’s commiserating, like she, too, has grown tired of all the baby talk.

Before he can blink, she’s looking away, back down to Poe’s phone, her voice high and delighted when she says, “He is just the cutest thing!” before Ben can really be sure it happened at all.

It was probably nothing, anyway.

His mother, as has been happening more and more since his birthday, manages to turn Poe’s new fatherhood into yet another topic she can bring up whenever she wants to bother him about starting a family.

Ben puts up with his the only way he knows how—by steadfastly ignoring it. He ignores, too, the twinge of jealousy that bursts in his chest at his mother’s obvious glee over the baby, how proud she is of Poe for something Ben will clearly never have. That’s Leia, though, he guesses. She wouldn’t be his mother if she wasn’t constantly pushing.

“You should be dating again,” she tells him once, in her office. It’s after a scheduled check-in, while he’s on his way out, because she, naturally, wanted to bring it up while he was standing, intellectually drained, and caught off guard, as if he were opposite her at a chess board rather than her son. “I can’t even remember the last time you brought someone home to meet us.”

Ben does remember. It was at the end of college, and it wasn’t an _us_ , it was only his mother. He hadn’t known, then, that she and his father were on the verge of reconciliation. She hadn’t saw it fit to tell him that until more than a year later. The girl’s name was Kate with a K, even though her parents spelled her full name Catherine with a C. “Because Kate with a K looks better than Cate with a C,” she liked to explain to people, assuming everyone was as interested in her name as she was. When she told his mother as such, with an unearned air of self-importance, Leia had smiled tightly and looked meaningfully at Ben with a raised eyebrow. _So_ this _is what you’ve chosen to bring to me_ , she conveyed, silent and judgmental.

The relationship only lasted another couple of weeks before Kate broke it off. He didn’t seem to like her as much as before, she said. He was depressing to be around. That was probably true, but it didn’t make it hurt any less.

Now, his mother seems to resent Ben for it, as if it is his fault he’s so reticent to try it out again, to watch his mother consider and discard his decision based on little more than a passing moment of rude behavior.

Ben promises her, semi-disdainfully, that he will be sure Leia is the first to know if he ever gets a girlfriend again. His mother smiles, content to be lied to about both him ever having a girlfriend again and her being the first to know it, and lets him leave without additional torment.

At the beginning of March, two weeks before spring break, Paige surprises Poe at work for lunch and time with the baby. She’s taking a sabbatical, she tells Ben when he runs into her in the hall, and was going stir-crazy cooped up at home. Jamie is nestled in her arms, his soft, impossibly tiny head rested on her shoulder. Yeah, Ben decides, looking at him, there are definitely E.T. comparisons to be drawn.

“Not that I don’t love my parents,” Paige says to him, rushed and breathless. Her eyes are sparkling with something that might be happiness or cabin fever, the joy of talking to an adult after days of Little Einstein and Mo Willems and Raffi (which Ben does recall, vaguely, listening to on his little tape player; he remembers best _the more we get together, together, together, the more we get together the happier we’ll be_ ). “Not that I don’t appreciate everything they’ve done for me, but if I get one more _oh we were just in the neighborhood is he having trouble latching I never had trouble getting you girls to breastfeed_ surprise drop-in from my mother, I might actually go apeshit.”

Ben stares at her evenly. He is careful not to glance at the emergency exit doors. “Sounds...tough.”

“Yes,” she is saying forcefully, “ _yes_ , would you hold him for a second? I have to piss like a racehorse,” and then there is a baby being shoved unceremoniously into his arms. Ben barely has time to wrap his palm around the back of Jamie’s head and neck, the other dropping to hold him in some approximation of an arm-cradle he’s seen once or twice before but never personally attempted, and Paige is hurrying past him before he can protest.

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to—” he attempts in a sudden panic, “I don’t think this is—”

“Ben, please, I have to _pee_!” she shouts over her shoulder, and then she turns the corner and vanishes from sight.

And there is no reason for it: that Ben somehow finds himself with a six-week old baby in his hands, and yet—there he is. Standing in the hallway of the upper school with a six-week old baby in his hands. Defying all things logical and natural and possibly also God Himself because—Ben. Holding a baby. Definitely not a normal situation.

He stands there, mouth ajar, lost in the middle of his place of work—and then Jamie huffs out a quiet little sigh and blinks his eyes open from his nap, peering up at Ben in mild interest.

Ben looks down at the tiny human in his arms, feeling startled, as if he had forgotten that the thing he is holding is capable of movement. As he watches, Jamie wriggles gently, nestling deeper in his makeshift cradle, and sighs again, his small chest expanding with a deep breath.

Ben stares. And stares. “Hi, kid,” he croaks out.

Jamie gurgles, sounding happy, sounding every bit the easy baby Poe has called him, and Ben...smiles. Not of his own volition—he can feel his mouth stretching into a grin, but he doesn’t do it consciously. It’s just—

There is a baby in his hands. With huge, dark eyes, and a head full of thick, dark hair. When Jamie was born, Poe told him, his entire body was covered with hair like that. Not only on his head, but on his arms, on his back. Like a little monkey, Poe said, a little monkey that had a cone-shaped head and looked more like a grandfather than an infant. “A little freak of a baby,” Poe said, laughing. “God, it was weird.”

The baby in Ben’s hands doesn’t look senile, or weird; he looks...sweet. Small. Slightly pudgy, heavy and soft. Like a baby. His eyes are gently slanted at the edges like his mother’s, his skin slightly darker than Ben’s own pale complexion, but to anyone passing by, anyone not looking too closely, Jamie could be mistaken for his.

“Hi,” Ben says again. He doesn’t change the register of his voice, doesn’t make even a wayward attempt at baby talk. He speaks to Jamie like he would to anyone. “Sorry you got stuck with me,” he goes on, stupidly. “I’m sure you’re not too happy about it.”

The baby doesn’t look unhappy though; he looks perfectly content to be in the circle of Ben’s big hands. He smacks his lips together, smiling with his mouth open and toothless.

“Your mom should be back soon.”

Jamie warbles as if in agreement and sticks a fat little hand up, reaching for Ben’s nose. An easy target, of course, and one he hits with the soft mound of his palm.

“I know, right? Of all the people she could leave you with.”

“Not such a bad option, it looks like.”

Ben glances back up to see Paige and Poe standing a few feet away, twin expressions of satisfied amusement crossing over their faces. Paige grins, continuing, “Thanks for not dropping him on the ground.”

She walks closer, arms outstretched to take her child back, when Poe stops her, laughing as he fumbles for his phone, “No, please, I have to commit this to memory. I need hard evidence of this moment.”

“Jesus,” Ben groans, but Poe is already snapping a photo, cackling gleefully at the sight.

“I’m sending this to everybody I know.”

“Please, don’t.” With Poe no longer concerned with stopping the transaction, Ben hands Jamie back to his mother, Paige smiling serenely at him as she takes her son back into her arms. Ben recalls how gorgeous Paige is when she smiles down at Jamie, her entire expression lighting up in joy, with her smooth skin and kind eyes and black hair curled gently, tucked just behind her ears. It’s shorter now than it was the last time he saw her at her birthday, chopped up to her chin.

“Seriously, Ben,” she says warmly, “thanks for watching him.”

“No problem.” He offers a flash of a smile, then, unexpected and genuine. Ben gestures to his own neck, indicating the new length of her hair. “Did you get a haircut?”

She moans pitifully, rocking Jamie onto her chest. “Please, don’t remind me. It’s a total mom cut. I was just sick of this one trying to rip my scalp off every time I held him. I can’t even wear jewelry anymore.”

“No, it suits you,” Ben assures her. “It looks really good.”

“See? That’s what I keep telling her.” Poe steps closer, the photo of Ben apparently safely winging off to whatever recipient Poe thought would appreciate the embarrassment the most. He wraps an arm around Paige’s shoulder and raises his other hand to curve around Jamie’s soft, fuzzy head. “Doesn’t mommy look good? Isn’t she a total babe?”

Unsurprisingly, Poe has no qualms about using baby talk or about narrating his wife’s hotness to his son. Paige screws up her face in half-hearted indignation and whacks Poe lightly on the arm. Poe grins, perfectly thrilled to be a little shit.

And Ben—watches them. Their family. He watches them and feels something prickling in his chest, like a lantern housing a small, insistent flame.

“I’ve got a thing,” he hears himself say, even though he does not have a thing for another few minutes because the coming period is his break, too. “So you guys—have a good lunch, alright?”

He moves forward, about to walk past them, when Paige stops him before he can leave completely.

“Wait,” she calls, and Ben spins around. “Poe and I wanted to ask—are you free this Saturday for drinks?”

“The in-laws offered to babysit for the weekend,” Poe adds, and mutters under his breath, “although I’m still not totally sure this isn’t just a plot to steal him away—”

Paige smacks his arm again, perhaps slightly more seriously than before, and his mouth opens in stubborn protest.

“Anyway,” she goes on sternly, interrupting her husband before he can begin. “We wanted to use some of the time to be grown-ups again, so we’re doing drinks at the new house. Can you come?”

Ben hesitates, not relishing the prospect of third-wheeling with Paige and Poe while they get steadily drunker. He did that once, had to bear witness to a sloppy makeout, and decided never again.

“Rose is coming,” Paige says, seeming to sense his reluctance. “She’s bringing her new boyfriend, and he, I guess, wants to bring his roommate or something, I don’t know who—”

“Babe, I already told you, it’s my friend Finn and his roommate Rey, I’ve mentioned them like a million times, you’ve already _met_ them—”

“Well, _I_ don’t remember—”

Poe scoffs, “Pregnancy brain—”

“—and _excuse me_ for wanting to be sure about the man my baby sister has apparently been drooling over for _months_ —”

“So wait,” Ben interrupts before the conversation can devolve further. He clears his throat and straightens up, steadfastly ignoring the sudden rush of adrenaline that pumped through his veins when he heard Rey’s name. _Be cool,_ he thinks. _Be normal._ “Why do I need to be there, exactly? Why not invite...I don’t know. Jannah?”

Poe snorts. “Paige needs an even number of guests, preferably an even split of men and women if we can swing it.”

“So no one is the odd one out,” she explains testily. “The dining room table seats six, and I can’t have one person sitting off to the side all sad and out of the loop. There needs to be a _balance_.”

“So that’s why,” Poe finishes. He lifts his eyebrows, hopeful. “Can you make it? For the sake of the numbers?”

Ben cocks his head and raises his eyes to the ceiling, pretending to mentally check his schedule. “Yeah, I don’t think I have anything to—”

“Great,” Paige bursts out, all ecstatic. “Poe will text you the new address and the time and everything, _thank you_ , Ben.”

“Yeah, let me just add you to the group chat—”

“Group chat?” Ben shifts his weight on his feet. “There’s a group chat I didn’t know about?”

Poe laughs, staring down at his phone in his hand as he taps on the screen to add Ben to the secret group chat he apparently wasn’t cool enough to be part of. “Don’t get all offended, dude,” Poe says, smirking, as if he can read Ben’s exact thoughts on the matter. “You hate groups. And chatting.” Ben’s phone buzzes in his pocket, and Poe smiles, looking back up. “There. Done. Now you’re in the inner circle. Do with it what you will.”

Ben tugs his phone out of his pocket as they walk past him, only vaguely aware of Paige and Poe saying their goodbyes. He opens his phone, and it’s right there on his lock screen, and then when he opens his messages, that _Poe Dameron added Ben Solo to the conversation_. A conversation titled _ALLIANCE REBELS_ with a little emoji of a person’s face with the _Aladdin Sane_ David Bowie lightning bolt.

His phone starts buzzing almost instantly, and it doesn’t stop.

The first two messages are from an unknown number with a California area code.

_omg Solo with a baby_

_OMG SOLO WITH A BABY_

Its only another moment before Rose’s name pops up, and Ben blinks. He’d honestly forgotten he has her number at all.

_ben i didnt think u were capable of such a feat_

_did my sister foist jamie upon u_

_did u cry in fright_

_or was it joy????_

_i night start sobbing with delight here at my desk my freshman are gonna laugh at me i hope youre happy_

Poe’s name appears then, and with it the aforementioned photo of Ben with Jamie in his hands. Sent a second time, it seems, for his specific benefit. Looking at the picture, Ben hardly recognizes himself—he looks somehow both annoyed, probably because of Poe taking the picture, and... _happy_. Absurdly. His eyes bright, the edge of a smile tipping up the corners of his mouth.

Another buzz, this time Poe’s name:

_Total champ [flexing arm emoji]_

_You can see my son is already planning to overthrow him._

The California area code number, same as before:

_Solo I didn’t think you had it in you._

_So sentimental._

_I’m astonished._

_And proud :’)_

Ben furrows his brow, frowning down at his phone. He ignores the bell sounding above his head and the stream of high schoolers that pour out into the hall moments later. He has enough wherewithal to step closer to the wall, out of the way of the crowd. Should he respond? He is deeply unfamiliar with and, for most of his life, has been entirely uninterested in the etiquette of a group message.

Before he can begin typing, his phone buzzes again (Poe, writing: _We are all so proud!_ ) and Ben resists the overwhelming impulse to groan in frustration. How is anyone supposed to communicate in this forum if by the time you can think of what to say the conversation has already moved on?

He finally settles on typing out, _Don’t all of you have children you’re supposed to be teaching?_

California area code says _BOO THEY’RE AT RECESS._ Rose says _theyre doing a pop quiz pls don’t tell on me to ur mom_. Poe sends a laughing while crying face emoji and nothing else.

There’s a new number though after that, not Rose’s or Poe’s or the California one. A 312 number. Chicago, he remembers, his heart picking up speed in his chest.

 _cute picture_ the new number says. And then, a string of emojis: a cloud, the face of a baby, a single eyeball. _welcome 2 the alliance rebels alliance_.

Ben holds his phone for a moment longer, waiting to see if it buzzes again. It doesn’t. After a moment, he pockets his cell again and steps off the wall to push against the current of bodies walking to their next class.

In his chest, the warmth grows slightly, like a hot flicker of lantern fire licking against cool walls of glass. He is careful not to smile. He doesn’t really want to anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ The more we get together the happier we’ll be! ](https://youtu.be/4crwVqxsVO0)


	20. i am invited to a party!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen......i wrote this entire fic for MINE OWN nefarious purposes but u guys can read it too.............if u would like........ :))))
> 
> this is part 1 of 2!!!!

** 20\. i am invited to a party!**

Saturday is a day he looks forward to with equal amounts of excitement and dread.

There is also a part of him, maybe a larger part than he’d like to admit, that is completely and utterly terrified, since the last time he saw Rey outside of work, it hadn’t exactly gone well.

The opposite, in fact. The complete and exact opposite of well.

Ben grows increasingly worried, as Saturday morning slips into afternoon, into evening, into night, that he is going to have a repeat performance of the whole... _daddy issues_ thing. Which, to be frank, Ben doesn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. If his mother had heard him, she’d have gone ballistic. And all that is not even to mention the first time they'd interacted outside of school, when he had a momentary lapse of sanity and danced with her, only it was less _dancing_ and more _standing with his thigh between her legs and his hand on her back in the middle of a bar_ and, come to think of it, maybe he should just call Poe and tell him he can’t come tonight because he’s pretty sure it’s only going to be worse, somehow.

Like Murphy’s Law, his father used to say, gently laughing, on mornings Ben was late for school coming from Han’s dinky little bachelor apartment—like the times when he’d trip over his shoelaces and spill orange juice on his shirt and get stung by a bee and drop his lunch all over the floor of the car and they hit every single red light on the way to school: whatever _can_ go wrong _will_ go wrong.

Somewhere between agonizing over which shoes he should wear and struggling to pick out a decent housewarming offering from Whole Foods, somewhere in the time he spends in an Uber flying through traffic— _how_ is there no traffic, he wonders; he gave himself thirty minutes to get to Poe and Paige’s new house so that he could arrive at a chill and relaxed time of exactly thirteen minutes after 8 p.m., which is when they told him to show up, and he makes it there in fifteen _flat_ , and it’s horrible, he was banking on the extra time to give himself a pep talk to be cool and normal and now he has to sit, white-knuckled, in the passenger seat and breathe steadily in through his nose and out through his mouth until the driver unceremoniously ejects him from the vehicle—somewhere in all that, he hopes the opposite happens tonight. The opposite of Murphy’s Law, everything going wrong, orange juice spilled and shoelaces tripped over and him blurting out something unforgivably shitty.

What that might look like? Ben has no fucking clue.

Despite his careful planning of his casual, fashionably late entrance, he is the first one to get to the house.

Paige opens the door, greets him brightly, thanks him for complimenting the house, and puts him to work drying off wine glasses almost immediately.

“If you’re going to host a dinner party,” his mother told him once, “make sure you have a small task to give the first arrival. It can mitigate the awkwardness, and that’s just good manners.”

Ben never really registered the strength of this suggestion until right this moment, because, in a very real way, it does help to ease some of his nerves. He gets into the rhythm of it while Paige bustles around the kitchen. Poe, it seems, is out getting more wine from Trader Joe’s.

“The cheap stuff,” she says, grinning over her shoulder at him, “for when I have my second glass and conveniently forget everything my sommelier father ever taught me about wine.”

While Ben works, the sleeves of his sweater rolled to his elbows to keep the edges from getting damp, she hauls out and subsequently fills up a dizzying array of Le Creuset bowls, plates, dishes, and ramekins. She sets out kumquats, dates, chocolate-covered cherries, popcorn, cheese and crackers, honeycomb, slices of apples and dragonfruit and pineapple—a veritable fucking cornucopia that she keeps adding to and adding to with more and more food.

Ben remembers this from the last time Poe talked him into going to their apartment for drinks. Together, Poe and Paige are a near lethal combination: both from big families, used to constant noise and ravenous appetites and ceaseless conversation. Paige kept pushing more and more food onto his plate, while Poe kept filling up his glass with more and more wine until Ben couldn’t tell any longer how much he’d actually had to drink or eat.

In short: he got fucking plastered and had one of the worst hangovers of his life. He’s gotten better about paying attention to how much they’re giving him, but he still ends up drunker and fuller than he’d planned on more often than not. It’s the reason why he took an Uber instead of driving.

His phone buzzes in his pocket once, then twice, then it keeps buzzing. With a frown, he glances through the texts in _ALLIANCE REBELS_ , his eyes skimming over the conversation the other four are having about how they’re running super late because _somebody_ (Rose, by all accounts including her own) took forever getting ready.

 _we will be there AND square_ says the number he has saved, now, as Rey.

 _Or we will die in this Lyft trying [face with snorting nostrils emoji]_ reiterates the number he doesn’t have saved as Finn.

Paige snorts, and Ben glances up. “God, I don’t know how Poe keeps up with that group message,” she says. “I have a hard enough time when too many people are CC’d on an email at work.”

“Yeah, it’s been pretty much nonstop. I’m thinking of just muting the notifications.” This is sort of a lie; Ben did consider that momentarily before immediately rejecting the idea. The impulse to see what Rey writes each time her name appears on his screen proved too great a temptation to ignore.

After all, he justified to himself, if he wants to have sex with her just the once, he should probably keep tabs on her. What she thinks about the new Marvel movie (it sucks and she doesn’t know why she keeps spending money to go see them; Finn heartily disagreed, and Ben was strangely pleased, not in small part due to the fact that he agreed with Rey), how she’s feeling about her most recent unannounced observation (it went better than the last one; he sent an extremely mild message after everyone else’s response that said only “Congratulations!”, and he called it a win that he only struggled over the exclamation point inclusion for a minute), how excited she is about the Shamrock Shake returning to McDonald’s (very, very, _very,_ with a near cult-like fervor). These, he decided, were good things to know. For sex-having purposes.

Yeah. That explanation definitely makes sense. He is not going to explore it any further than that.

“Poe’s been trying to figure out how to trick you into agreeing to that group chat for ages,” Paige is telling him. Ben quirks an eyebrow, her voice quieting, then lifting again as she starts carrying the dishes out of the kitchen to the dining room table. “He’ll be heartbroken if he finds out you muted it.”

At this, Ben pauses in his movements. “What? Why didn't he just ask me to join?”

“You know my husband.” Paige rolls her eyes, dumping the entirety of a container of what looks like upscale trail mix into a bowl. Ben lifts it up, now finished with the stemware, and brings it to the table—mahogany, leaves pulled out to seat six. There’s a Danish-inspired lamp fixture above, a sliding glass door behind the dining room overlooking a perfectly landscaped backyard. Jesus fuck, if this isn’t a nice house. Poe showed pictures, of course, when they’d first moved in, but it looks better in person. There are still some moving boxes around, but less than a normal person would have in similar straights. Paige is too wildly efficient to leave things for long. “His thinking is,” she goes on, “the obvious thing to do is too easy and is therefore wrong. He over complicates everything.” She rolls her eyes lovingly. “That’s why he loves Ancient Greek so much.”

“But he could have—”

Paige rolls her shoulders back. “Ben. Be honest. If he’d asked you straight out to join a group message with my sister and Finn and his roommate, would you have said yes?”

He thinks about this. “No,” he concedes after a moment. “Probably not.”

She nods, satisfied at her logic, and sets about arranging the cornucopia in a more visually pleasing manner. Ben sets out the glasses and wine according to Paige’s specific directions, which is when the front door bangs open and they’re hit with a solid wall of pure sound.

Ben can hear Rose, Finn, and Rey spilling into the front room, Rose and Finn’s voices overlapping as they openly marvel at the house. “Is that a spiral staircase?” he can hear Finn ask; “I want to die on this sofa, thanks, this leather is so buttery,” Rose adds. He listens, but he can’t hear Rey’s reply.  
  
“Babe!” Poe bursts into the dining room with the kind of energy Ben can only imagine generating. The three others spill in after him, giggling and chattering. Ben lowers his eyes rather than look at them, fiddling with the corkscrew to uncap one of the cabernets Paige brought out from their kitchen’s honest-to-god built-in wine cooler, ready to be decanted. He doesn’t want to seem...too excited, too eager to look at Rey.

He is. But he doesn’t want to _seem_ so.

“Stop the presses,” Poe goes on, pulling bottles of wine out of a Trader Joe’s bag and moving them onto the table, “Rey didn’t—oh shit, babe, this spread is amazing.”

Paige grins, bending her knees in a little curtsy. “Thank you.”

“Rey didn’t eat dinner,” Poe continues, finally remembering his original intention after a momentary distraction. “I’m ordering a pizza.”

“But, _Poe_ , I set out all this stuff.”

“And it’s _amazing_ , and I promise, I will stand guard and watch like a hawk to make sure everyone eats every single bite.”

Ben snorts. “Like you don’t do that already.”

“It all looks great,” Rey pipes up. Ben keeps his eyes trained down, even while he blocks out every single sound but her voice. He’s cool. Casual. Nothing to see here. It’s just the woman he’s been trying to fuck for ages and he has her phone number and they are outside of school and now he can’t resist, he looks up and takes in a messy topknot and tiny gold earrings that flash in the light and a loose-knit sweater layered over denim shorts that are sinfully tiny, barely there really, showing off her long, tan legs, ending in white socks and pink shoes, and how fucking fantastic her thighs would look wrapped around his waist, and okay, he’s looking back down at the wine now. The cork pops out at an awkward angle, tilting the bottle forward too far, and some of the wine spills on the table. Ben mops it up hastily with the dishrag he used to clean the dishes, still flung over his shoulder. Under his hair, his ears are burning.

He decides this is not a metaphor.

“I’m stupid,” Rey is still explaining. “I thought it was a dinner thing, and then Rose said it was just going to be drinks and snacks and we were already running late and I didn’t have time to eat and—”

“Rey,” Paige laughs, “it’s really okay. We can order a pizza.”

The man in question is already doing so, phone pressed to his ear. Ben glances back up, just in time to see Rey’s toothy grin as she looks around the dining room, stares at each and every detail. “And this house?” she says, luminous in her contentment. Ben can’t look away; he hates that he can’t look away. “It’s...so beautiful.”

Poe covers the receiver of his phone with a hand and calls, “Thanks, girl.”

“Good vibes, through and through,” Rose agrees. She’s the first to grab a chair at the table, spreading her arms out as if to caress the wood. She pops a handful of popcorn in her mouth, the truffle oil Paige sprinkled over it sticking to her fingers. Her clean hand lifts the recently dried glass so she can stroll around the table, tugging the wine bottle out of his hands with a gentle smile and pouring a generous (scratch that— _extremely_ generous) glass for him, and then another for herself.

“It’s all coming together, fellas,” Paige says. “This is a celebration, of my baby and my house, and I expect all of you to act accordingly and grant me the attention I am owed.”

She pours a glass for herself, the same amount as her sister. Rose and Paige clink their glasses together, in a familiar bit Ben has seen a few times before.

“Doctor,” Paige says, and Rose nods seriously.

“Doctor.”

They each gulp down half of their glasses in one long pull.

Rey’s eyes shift, catching Ben’s gaze, a silent question of _is this normal?_ written in her face. He shrugs, a lopsided grin slanting across his face.

Rey smiles, softer than before, and sits down at the table in the chair next to the one he’s standing in front of, while Paige pours out a healthy amount of wine for Finn.

“Eat,” she says, “drink!”

They all do, responding to the command obvious in her voice.

And just like that, the night begins.

Rey likes pineapple on pizza. This is discovered when she plucks a handful of pineapple cubes from a ramekin and layers it on her slice.

The table explodes in outraged indignation due, in small part, to real disgust and, in much larger part, the fact that everyone is on either their third or fourth glass of wine. No one can tell how much anyone has actually consumed, which is a big element of the Paige/Poe methodology—although Paige seems to be sparing herself, sticking to a few sips here and there rather than guzzling down wine.

“ _How_?” Finn sputters.

“ _Why_?” Rose adds, sounding agonized.

“For _what possible reason_ would you _do_ that to yourself?”

Rey does nothing but shrug and cram as much of the pizza into her mouth as physically possible. Ben has a feeling that if she could unhinge her jaw to swallow more efficiently, she would. “It’s good,” she says around a mouthful of food.

The way she eats continues to horrify Ben, but, as he drinks his wine, he finds her enthusiasm for food somewhat...endearing. Maybe even quietly heartbreaking—she eats like she’s terrified her meal might be taken away at any moment. Which, maybe, used to be a fear based in reality. Ben takes to gently shoving more bowls her way, letting her dip her slender fingers into the homemade guac Poe likes to brag about.

“Pomegranate seeds,” he announced to the table when he first brought it out from the kitchen. “That, my friends, is the secret to fantastic guacamole.”

Rey waxes poetic about each dish she tries until Paige blushes from the force of her boundless enthusiasm.

Now, with the arrival of the pizza, each person at the table is aghast with horror as Rey digs in, pineapple juice trickling down her jaw.

Ben has never liked pineapple, but he thinks it would taste good if he licked it off of her skin, the same way lemonade makes lemon juice taste good: by adding something far too sweet.

“I really don’t understand how you can spit in the face of God like that,” Finn deadpans over his own plain slice of cheese after she eats her fill. “It’s unnatural. Like a cat walking on its hind legs.”

Rey swipes her palm across her face, clearing up the crumbs, and grins, seeming downright pleased with the reaction.

“Oh, spare me,” she says, still grinning. “You love licorice. That’s way worse than Hawaiian pizza.”

Ben grimaces. “ _Licorice_?”

“Oh, god, horrific—”

“Ooh! New idea!” Rose claps her hands together around the stem of her glass, sloshing a bit of wine on the table that her sister promptly replenishes. “Everybody say what your worst opinion is. It has to be one you know will make everybody upset. Nothing political or religious though, I’d rather not have an actual riot tearing through my sister’s house.”

Paige winks. “Thanks, Rosie.”

“I’ll go first,” Rose volunteers, setting one hand over her heart and raising her full glass with the other, as if taking a pledge. “I had never heard Don’t Stop Believing until I saw the pilot episode of _Glee_ , and I still, to this day, like their version better.”

Ben glares at her, and Rose stares back, the challenge clear in her eyes. The rest of the table blows up in self-righteous fervor.

“Paige prefers the _Pitch Perfect_ version of No Diggity,” she adds over the uproar, squealing gleefully, and Paige gasps, clapping a hand over her mouth.

“I told you that in confidence,” she hisses, trying to seem angry but succeeding only in laughing.

Poe grins, nodding at his wife across the table. “Honey, I think that might be grounds for irreconcilable differences.”

“Oh, really? You wanna throw me under the bus?” Paige leans closer to Rey, stage whispering, “Poe has never finished a Jane Austen adaptation. He thinks they’re _cheesy_.”

It’s Rey’s turn to gasp, and she narrows her eyes at Poe, shaking her head slowly. “Unforgivable,” she says, over-enunciating each syllable like she's trying to keep herself from slurring the words. “Truly heinous and unforgivable, _Paige_ , I don't know _how_ you're married to him.”

“Me neither.” Paige shakes her head, her lips tilted up as she gazes at Poe. That, Ben decides, is what gazing actually looks like.

He has _definitely_ never done that.

Beside him, Rey finishes off the last of her drink, and Paige, sitting catty-corner at the end of the table, pours another healthy amount in her glass that Rey lifts automatically to her lips to gulp down.

“Be careful,” Ben says, his voice low and quiet. Rey blinks, as if suddenly realizing there is someone sitting next to her. Her eyes are wide, her cheeks flushed and hair in gentle disarray. She’d disposed of her pink shoes at Paige's insistence, and now she sits with her feet tucked underneath her body, knees under the table.

“Um,” she says, inelegantly, and shifts in her chair, toes wiggling in her ankle socks. "Careful?”

“Be careful to count, I mean,” he clarifies. “Paige and Poe have a bad habit of trying to get their guests as drunk as possible as quickly as possible.”

Rey scoffs, but her words are slightly slurred when she tells him, “I can handle it, Ben. I'm a big girl.”

He cracks a smile of his own. “Alright, just. Count, okay?”

“He's right,” Rose adds, voice muffled into her glass. “Finn, watch out, or Poe is going to give you alcohol poisoning.”

“I hate _Breaking Bad_ , okay!” Finn bursts out, like he has been trying to contain the words, and Poe abruptly spills in the middle of refilling Finn's drink. “I tried watching it, and I hate _Breaking Bad_ , and I wish I liked it but I don't!”

Rose wails melodramatically, “But you told me you liked it!” even while the rest of the table begins arguing about the merits of The Fly episode versus Ozymandias. “How,” Poe is saying, his voice loud to make himself heard, “could the same director direct the _best_ episode of the series _and_ the _worst_? It boggles the mind!”

There's only one right answer to the question, which could probably qualify as Ben's most controversial opinion, which is that they're equally good. He decides to keep this to himself.

Finn points, semi-accusingly and semi-playfully, in Ben's direction. “Solo still hasn't said his worst opinion yet.”

“I have too many to list,” he replies blithely. The room is not starting to swim yet, which is good, but he does have to think very carefully about every single word he says, which is bad. Also he wants to fuck the woman sitting next to him, which is something he hopes he does not say aloud, which is a concern that is becoming more and more...concerning, with every single sip.

“The hive mind requires a specific example,” Rey says wryly, nudging his elbow on the table with hers.

Ben runs a hand through his hair, trying to think, his brain running as slow as dial-up, a reference Rey would probably not get because of how young and attractive she is. “I hate The Beatles,” he settles on finally, half just to answer and half to keep himself from saying something stupid like, _can I lick the pineapple juice off your chin? It’s for a good cause._

“You don’t like _Sergeant Pepper_?” Poe challenges.

Finn makes a face. “Even _The White Album_?”

Ben feigns a shiver, his mouth quirking with amusement. “God, yes. Awful.”

“Let It Be?”

“Come Together?”

“Hey Jude?”

“ _Especially_ Hey Jude.”

“A man after my own heart,” Rey says, and when Ben darts his eyes back over to her, she is already there, already staring at him with mischief written all over her face. “Fuck The Beatles.”

Finn's hand is over his chest, his eyes wide with betrayal. “ _Rey_. How could you?”

“ _Fuck_ The Beatles,” she shouts, grinning wildly.

The table erupts with sound all over again.

“Hey, Alexa—”

“I told you, Rose, it's an Apple one—”

“Hey, Google—”

“No, you have to say _hey, Siri—”_

“Ew, Paige, I don't want to talk to _Siri_ —”

“You have to, or it won't _do_ anything—”

“Hey, Siri, play—”

“If you play One Week again, I swear to _Jesus_ , Rose—”

“Hey, Siri,” Rey hollers, grabbing the bowl of popcorn from the coffee table while she lounges on other end of the oversized sofa, “play Toxic by Britney Spears.”

There is a little robotic trill, a flicker of lights from the speaker. “ _Okay. Here's I'm a Slave 4 U by Britney Spears.”_

“ _No_!” the three women howl as the song starts up.

From his position leaning on the arm at the edge of the couch, Ben bursts out laughing at the genuine sorrow in their voices. This, of course, is how he knows he’s gone past buzzed and is well ensconced in full inebriation.

Poe can tell, because Poe can always tell. He glances back at Ben from his position on the floor, where his fat, orange dog Bebe has half of her body draped over his knees. “For someone so huge, you’re a total lightweight.”

“Psh,” Ben says, distantly aware that he is not helping his case. “ _You’re_ a lightweight.”

“Ha! And you told _me_ to count my drinks,” Rey slurs, shifting her attention away from the argument the other two women are having vis a vis Britney Spears songs to play. “I’ll have you know I only had—” She furrows her brow, seeming to count on her fingers, “fifteen glasses.”

“That number’s not right.” He takes a very sincere pleasure at the fact that he, at least, doesn’t sound so obviously drunk.

“No,” Finn says, slouching his body slowly from the middle couch cushion and onto the floor to pet the corgi, “she has a point.”

“All part of my plan,” Poe says happily, turning his attention back to the Ticos. “Play Closing Time—no, _The OC_ theme song— _no_! Semi-Charmed Life!”

Rey hasn’t looked away from him. She tilts forward headfirst, seeming, for a moment, like she might topple over completely, before she plants her hands on the cushion between them and catches herself at the last moment. She whispers, loudly, “How are you drunk?”

This, in his current state, is a difficult question to parse. “How?” he manages eventually.

“You’re big,” she gets out, hiccuping. “You’re a big...big...” Her eyes glaze over, like she’s lost her train of thought.

Ben waits for a moment to see if she can catch the thread. “Big?”

She nods, her jaw slack. “Big man. Not supposed to be drink. Drunk.”

From his new position on the floor, Finn reaches the hand not petting Bebe’s ears up, patting Rey sympathetically on the knee. Her bare knee.

Ben wants to bodily shove Finn’s hand off of her. It is a testament to his good mood and his own thin sliver of self-control that he manages to prevent his drunk brain from doing just that.

“Oh, honey,” Finn says, rubbing a circle on Rey’s knee. Ben sets about grinding his molars into dust. “I think you’ve had enough.”

“Hey, did you guys know Ben can skateboard?” Poe asks the room, voice loud in the way it gets when he’s had any more than one beer.

”Can someone say non-sequitur?” Rose says, and Paige yells over the music, “Non-sequitur!”

There is a light smack on his arm. Ben scowls, turning to glare at whoever hit him. All of his annoyance melts when he sees Rey, who has scooted closer to him, now seated on the middle cushion. “Ben!” she says excitedly. “You can skateboard?”

He shrugs. “Yeah, I guess.”

She’s practically vibrating from the strength of her excitement now. “How? Why?”

He shrugs again. Her hand is still on his arm; it burns through the thin fabric of his sweater. He’ll probably have a mark underneath. “I grew up here,” he says. “It was the nineties. It was easier than walking everywhere.”

“I can skateboard, too,” Finn interjects, but Rey shushes him without tearing her eyes away from Ben.

“Show me,” she demands.

He searches the room, as if looking for something, either an excuse or a skateboard. “What—now?”

“Yes!”

“With...” He blinks. His head feels...heavy. Filled with liquid. “What?”

“This neighborhood is full of families,” Paige says, collapsing on the other end of the couch where Rey was just sitting. “I bet if you walked around a bit, you could find a something to demonstrate on.”

“Come on, show me,” Rey needles, inching closer. Her knees are touching his thigh, and her chin is almost on his shoulder. She smells like citrus, and Ben can’t breathe, and he is on the verge of agreeing to something very stupid. “I won’t let you fall down, _promise_. Please. Pleeeeeeeeease.”

He groans, throwing his head back on the couch. “Fine.”

Rey jumps up so fast she nearly topples over onto Bebe. “Shoes! Where are my shoes—”

“I’m coming with,” Rose says, grinning. “This I need to see.”

“Might as well,” Finn adds, getting to his feet with a smile. “Even if I can and _will_ outskate you.”

It’s a blur, after that, a rush of putting on shoes and checking phones to make sure no one’s battery has died and making sure everyone knows the address to get back. Paige and Poe bow out, citing a need to stay home and welcome them back in just in case anyone wants to return before splitting a rideshare home.

“They're definitely going to fool around on the couch while we’re gone,” Rose whispers, none too quietly, by the front door.

“I don’t think I have the right shoes for this,” Ben mutters, glaring at his feet as if they have betrayed him instead of the other way around. _Maybe_ , his idiot brain says, _you should’ve worn your Converse, you should have known Rey would make you skateboard and planned accordingly and now you’re going to look dumb—_

“Ben.”

He blinks, and Rey is standing in front of him. The door is open—when did that happen?—and Rose and Finn are already on the sidewalk in front of the house, waving them over.

“C’mon,” Rey says, tugging on his forearm and stumbling into his chest when the action doesn’t so much as budge him. She backs up, her skin flushed pink, and pulls again, slightly less intensely. “We’re on a mission.”

Before he can think of a good reason to say no (he’s sure there are many), or devise a method by which he can keep from embarrassing himself (which he is sure he will), his legs jolt in a forward motion. He allows himself to be moved, and he feels it all: Rey’s hand on his skin, and the cool night air, and the faint stirrings of something in the middle of his chest.

She leads, and he follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I believe in making eyes across the room. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNkUGUY7OQw)


	21. fox in socks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright...........they r both dumb as shit. that's the whole chapter.

** 21\. fox in socks**

The first problem with Rey’s plan is apparent from the get-go: namely, that none of them have any idea where to find a skateboard. This does nothing to diminish Rey's seemingly endless supply of enthusiasm. Ben finds it somewhat odd, considering that up until recently (and it is _very_ recently) their relationship (not a relationship; their acquaintance) was nothing short of relentlessly hostile, scattered with moments of unsettling honesty and/or sexual frustration. Reasonably speaking, her interest in his ability to skateboard should not be so intense, and it certainly should not be something she is capable of sustaining past the initial few minutes of drunken excitement.

But she does sustain it, even when they have been walking for ten minutes with no apparent direction and have found exactly nothing for Ben to demonstrate on.

The second problem takes longer to present itself. Rose is the one who points it out, her voice tinny and faraway where she and Rey are walking ahead of Ben and Finn. Ben has been attempting, for the past few minutes (or ten, or fifteen, or really just the entirety of the walk), to figure out what, if anything, he should say to the other man.

Ben is just opening his mouth to say God knows what when Rose saves him, turning and calling back to them, “I’m pretty sure we’ve been down this road before.”

He looks around. Sure enough, the street looks vaguely familiar—a row of familiar houses, a row of familiar trees bursting into bloom on a row of familiar, impeccably mowed lawns.

It takes them another five minutes to determine how to get to another street from there, since it seems that they have been traveling in some convoluted approximation of a circle.

Even that setback does nothing to reduce Rey’s commitment to her goal.

“Does this happen often?” Ben hears himself say after another few minutes, once they’re finally out of the labyrinthian loop of cul-de-sacs they were briefly trapped in. He watches Rey skipping ahead of them, white moonlight skimming over the backs of her legs, over the expanse of skin revealed by the collar of her sweater slipping off of her freckled shoulder.

Finn knits his eyebrows together as he glances at Ben from his periphery. “Does what happen often?”

“The—” Ben waves his hand forward, gesturing vaguely to Rose and Rey, who are continuing on down the road, entirely undeterred by their current lack of success. “When she gets an idea, how she...”

He trails off, cursing the buzz of alcohol still coursing through him. If he were sober, he might be capable of articulating his meaning.

Although, if he were sober, he wouldn’t be in the situation he finds himself in now: wandering aimlessly in search of a skateboard, which is a tool (tool? game? sporting apparatus?) he hasn’t used anytime in the past fifteen years, trying to make small talk with a person he would ordinarily never attempt small talk with.

Finn, somehow, gets his meaning anyway. He huffs out a small breath of laughter and lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug.

“When Rey gets something in her head,” he says, fondness obvious in his tone, “nothing slows her down. The girl is an unstoppable force.”

A flash of a smile crosses Ben’s face before he can manage to tamp it down. “I’m starting to get that, yeah,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

Finn stops walking then, his change in movement so abrupt that it takes Ben three steps before he realizes Finn is staring at him, his brow furrowed. Ben pauses out of sheer unease, turning back toward him.

Finn eyes him with clear suspicion. The street lamps above their heads are casting his face in shadow, hiding something in his expression, something Ben can’t quite place.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do with her,” Finn says after a long moment, his voice hard. “But if you get out of line, you’re gonna have me to deal with.”

Ben blinks. “Huh?” he manages lamely.

Finn takes a step closer, so that now Ben can see his eyes, how they flicker to look just over Ben’s shoulder, like he’s checking to see if the two women can hear him.

“Rey is special,” he says, each word a blunt instrument when he looks back to Ben. “Not just to me, in general. I don’t care if you’re Poe’s friend, if you bother her—if you _hurt_ her—”

Ben’s head is spinning. He starts to interrupt, to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” but only manages to get our the first three words when his sentence is cut in half by a shriek of pure joy.

“ _Success_!”

He glances away from Finn, letting out his breath in a silent rush, thankful for the interruption. Across the street, Rey is crossing someone's front yard, carrying a skateboard that, even from a distance, is visibly nicer than the one Ben used to practice on when he was a teenager.

“You found one?” Rose squeals, and Rey grins wider.

Ben shakes his head as she approaches him, feeling slightly light-headed, and realizing suddenly how ridiculous and terrible of an idea this is. And this, he realizes, is the third problem, because it’s not like he thought she’d actually find a skateboard and—oh god, he's definitely going to fall over, isn't he?

Rey nods as if answering his question, the smile never once slipping off her face. She thrusts the skateboard at him until his hands close around the edges.

“Yes,” she says brightly. “Now go! Show us! Be Tony Hawk!”

His lips slant in a half-smile despite himself. “I’m shocked you know who that is.”

She seems offended when she responds, “Who doesn’t know Tony Hawk?”

“Probably most of my students.”

“They need to add it to the curriculum then,” Rose calls. She has taken a seat on the curb, her legs crossed on the ground in front of her. Finn is standing next to her in the grass, arms folded. Ben looks away from him, trying to ignore the mistrust written all over the other man. “Great American Heroes: Nineties Edition.”

“I’ll take it up with the head of the Social Sciences department,” he calls back.

Ben drops the skateboard onto the pavement with a clatter and stares at it for a long moment, trying to remember how he used to start this out. This probably qualifies as the fourth problem.

In front of him, Rey takes a small step closer. “Ben, are you sure you’re good to—”

“What?” He frowns. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, just—trying to remember how to—”

He stomps down at the edge of the board, watching with a small flicker of satisfaction as it flips up into his hand.

Okay. Not too bad.

He lets it fall back onto the ground and tries to position his feet in a way that best makes sense, accounting for the fact that he's taller and heavier than he was as a teenager.

Rey lets out a whoop of appreciation when he manages, somehow, to flip the board on its axis under his feet. Rose calls out something like, _you got this, Solo!_

It takes him a moment to realize he’s grinning.

After that, it’s easy enough to slip back into it. Muscle memory, he thinks. Instinct. He skates halfway down the street, and the wind whipping through his hair makes him think of how it felt to do this when he was a teenager, his legs burning with exertion as he pushed up the hill to his house, the way his heart used to pound when he picked up enough speed to coast over the gravel. How he and his neighbor used to race each other to any number of made-up finish lines, back before the other boy’s family moved up to San Diego and left him behind.

Ben kind of wonders where Tai is now.

His lungs ache, and his legs hurt, but he keeps pushing, skating further away from the others, letting the sounds of their encouragement fade into the background, blending in with the hum of the street lights, the chirp of the crickets. He feels light, lighter than the air around him. Untethered. Capable of floating away completely, almost unbearably so—

In the darkness, he doesn’t see the low-hanging tree branch jutting into the road until it connects with his face.

Then, somehow, he is off the board and on his back, his eyes drifting between the stars above him. He lets his head fall back onto the pavement after a moment, glad his arms broke that part of his fall at least. Although, fuck, his elbows hurt like hell.

He lets out a shuddering breath as the sounds of the other three grow closer. Rey is the first one to reach him, and he jerks upright as she kneels beside him, her face creased in worry.

“Ben! Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He struggles into a sitting position while her hand curls around the side of his face. There’s a distant throbbing around his temples, an ache over his eyebrow and halfway down his cheek. “Yeah, I’m good.”

Her eyes widen. Her voice is almost agonized as she says, “You’re bleeding.”

“Am I?” His fingertips tap over his skin, over the space above and below his right eye where pain throbs dully. They come away tipped with red. “Oh, shit,” he says mildly.

He’s not particularly aware of anything outside of the continued press of her hand to the side of his face. Some part of him registers seeing the back of Rey’s neck when she looks back to Finn and Rose. “Do you think he might need stitches?”

The next voice he hears is Rose. “No, it doesn't look deep. Just a long...perimeter. Circumference. Fuck, I don't know the word.”

“I think it's just a line.”

“A line then. I’ll run to Paige’s and get some bandaids. Finn, let’s go.”

Ben can’t see Finn, but he can picture well enough his frown when he replies, “I think I should stay here.”

Ben doesn’t pay much attention to their ensuing argument, too distracted by the way Rey has shifted her attention away from the others and back to him, her eyebrows tilted together in concern, expression fraught with worry. Her cool little hand on his face is an odd sensation, a strange contrast to the heat of own skin, the sweat that curls the hair at his temples.

“Finn, Rey is _fine_ watching him.”

“Shouldn't he just come with?”

“Do you really want to be the one that has to carry him if he faints? Come on, let’s go.”

“But—”

Rey interrupts at last, not looking away from him when she calls back, “Finn, I’m _fine_. Go.”

It takes another long moment, a few more reassurances that they’ll be okay on their own, before the sound of Finn and Rose heading back toward the house fades and then disappears entirely.

And then, they're alone. Rey is still stroking her fingers along the line of his cheek, and Ben doesn't know where to look so he glances down, where her teeth dig into the pink flesh of her bottom lip, so he shifts his attention to the gentle point of her shoulder, where there's a constellation of freckles dotting her skin.

After that, he looks away from her completely, swallowing down the lingering taste of berries that prickles the inside of his throat.

Once she has contented herself that she's fully examined him, Rey lets out a small puff of air and drops her hand, meeting his eyes again. “Sorry about all that.”

“It’s fine,” he murmurs. “He’s really—” He searches for a word that won't make her furious. “Protective of you, huh?”

A rueful smile flickers over her features. “Yeah, kind of.”

“I was just—” Ben sighs, steeling himself. “Have you told him about...?” The sentence trails off, and he watches his meaning click with her, her hazel eyes widening.

“What? No, I haven’t—did you—did _he_ —” she stammers.

“It’s nothing,” Ben assures her quickly. “Just the way he was talking to me earlier. Like...an older brother threatening to beat me up if I broke his kid sister’s heart.”

Her expression hardens, her smile sliding off her face near instantly. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m really not.”

She groans, “Oh, I could just _strangle_ him.” Ben almost smiles; being on the other side of her ire is an interesting, not unenjoyable experience. She crosses her arms, pinching her fingers over the bridge of her nose. She gestures into the air with her other arm, going on, “I’m sorry he said that to you. I don’t know what he was thinking.”

He shakes his head. “It’s fine. I was just...confused, mostly. About why he’d say that if he doesn’t know about it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he—” She hesitates, shrugging.

“Maybe he what?”

“Picked up on a...vibe or something.”

“Vibe?” The word is weird in his mouth, something he’s heard from his students but could have never really envisioned himself repeating. It is, apparently, a night of many things he never really envisioned himself doing. Or doing _again_ , at least.

Rey nods, her features set in thought. “An energy. A tension, maybe.”

“He said—” Ben thinks, remembers only minutes ago Finn’s face set in stone, _i_ _f you bother her, if you_ hurt _her—_ “Have I been...bothering you?”

“Yes,” she says, seemingly automatically, then immediately contradicts herself with, “No. Not like that.”

He can't tell if his head hurts from bleeding or from confusion. “What?”

“You—you _bother_ me, but you don’t... _bother_ me. You know? Does that—” She laughs briefly at the expression on his face. “I’m not making any sense at all, am I?”

“Not even slightly.” He cracks a smile and then winces, pain suddenly throbbing under his skin, sharper than the dim ache from before.

Rey’s eyes light with concern again. She scoots closer to him, her hands pushing at his shoulders until he gets the idea and backs up to sit on the curb behind them. 

“Here,” she says softly. “Don’t move. Let me just—” She fumbles with her purse, tugging out a packet of tissues and ripping one out. She folds the paper into a small rectangle and presses it against where he must be bleeding, her lips quirked as her gaze flits over his features. “There. Better?”

His hands covers hers for the brief moment it takes for the makeshift gauze to change hands. “Yeah, a bit.”

“I’m sorry.”

He lets out a small breath of laughter. “You keep apologizing.”

She shrugs. “I have a lot to apologize for. I shouldn’t have asked you to do anything that required any level of real coordination.”

“I could’ve just said no,” he points out.

“Yeah. Still. It’s my fault you got hurt.”

“It’s not so bad.”

She considers him. His instinct, oddly, is to look away at the attention, but instead he finds himself searching her face, taking her in the way she’s taking him in. “It doesn’t look too bad,” she agrees after a moment, and he almost startles, having forgotten why she was even looking. “Maybe you’ll get a cool scar.”

“My sixteen-year-old self would be thrilled,” he mutters, and she laughs, loud and bright. “What’s so funny?”

“Just—” She waves a hand over his face, still giggling, and leans into his side. “Imagining you as a teenager.”

He pushes her away half-heartedly, but she just leans in closer, a grin lingering on her lips. “Shut up.”

“Skateboarding,” she taunts, the words still slightly clumsy from drink, “calligraphy-ing, listening to Everclear.”

“I didn't listen to Everclear.”

“The Smashing Pumpkins, same difference.”

He frowns, somewhat miffed at her accuracy. “You listened to Hole, and you're trying to make fun of me for teen angst?”

“Sod off,” she tosses out carelessly, the smile not leaving her face. His eyes drop to her mouth for a moment before she speaks again and they fly back up to hers. “I think you'll be okay, really. I told you, didn't I? That I broke the same leg twice?”

He flinches in sympathy. “Ouch. What’d you do?”

She thinks for a moment, her expression distant as she remembers. “It was—I was three, I think. Fell out of the window of the flat.”

“Jesus. How'd that happen?”

“It's—” She sighs, her shoulders lifting to her ears and falling again. “My mother was high, and not paying attention, and—doesn't matter. It didn't heal right the first time. I broke it again a few months later.”

His eyes trace over her face. “I'm sorry.”

She waves her hand. “Don't be. It's nothing.”

“It's not nothing,” he says, his voice low and insistent. Suddenly, for no reason at all, it’s very important to him that she listen to this—that she _knows_ this. “You didn't deserve that. You deserved—you deserve better than them.”

Something in her features softens, her voice low when she murmurs, “Thank you, Ben.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. Rey shifts beside him, stretching her legs out in front of her. Ben checks the tissue he has still pressed against his eyebrow, feeling slightly dizzy when it comes away covered with blood. Rey notices, reaching into her purse again to hand him another.

He murmurs a thanks and folds it up, pressing it back to his cheek. “I broke my arm once,” he offers.

“Right or left?”

“Right. And I'm right-handed.”

“Ooh.” She grins, and something in him feels absurdly proud that he made her smile again. “Tough blow.”

“Yeah, it wasn't a great month and a half.”

Her smile only grows. “Oh, poor honey.”

He raises the eyebrow not currently bleeding. “Honey?” he repeats.

“That’s what I call my kids,” she explains. “When they’re hurt.”

“Yeah?”

She nods. Her dimples are distracting, so much so that he almost misses her saying, “Yeah. I’m used to a lot more tears, so you’re doing pretty well.”

“Oh, am I?”

She nods again, falsely serious. “Yes. Very brave. Usually, I’d be trying to get you to stop screaming at this point.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah. I’d come over all,” She affects her teacher voice, the pitch of it more musical, falling and rising animatedly as she demonstrates the demeanor she’d use with her students, “Oh, Ben, did you fall down?” She gestures to him, landing a slender hand on his shoulder. “And you’d be crying. And I’d be very gentle. I _am_ very gentle,” she corrects.

His mouth quirks. “Yeah?”

“Mhm,” she hums. “I’d hold your head still.” She does, tilting his chin up with her slim fingers, her other hand still curled around his shoulder. His own hand falls away, crumpling the tissue, giving her more room to explore the planes of his cheeks. “And I'd say, let me see, Ben. Oh, I can see that you have a cut. I’m sorry you fell down. I can see you’re feeling sad about it. Do you want to take a few deep breaths with me?”

She mimes gulping huge breaths of air, the action punctuated with chuckles at what he is sure is his own expression of amusement.

“And then what do you do?”

“I tell them getting hurt is no fun, but I can give them a plaster to help the bleeding stop.”

“A plaster?” he says, repeating the word in her accent, and she taps his shoulder playfully.

“Shh, quiet, I’m on a roll. Then, if the kid seems like they need it, I’d say, do you need me to kiss it to make it feel better?”

“And they usually say yes, I'm guessing.”

“Naturally.” Her eyes meet his. The words are low, her mouth twisting as she murmurs, “Do you need me to kiss it to make it feel better?”

Something flutters in the pit of his stomach. His voice is just as soft as hers when he says, “Yes.”

“Then, I would do this—” She presses her mouth to the tip of her thumb, “—and then—” She leans closer to him and grazes her thumb across his eyebrow. Slowly. Carefully. Her fingers splay over his face, the heel of her palm skating down his cheek, and he watches her chest expand with a shaking breath. “Just like that,” she finishes.

He has to clear his throat, his mouth suddenly dry, before he can respond. “Yeah?”

Her fingers are still on his skin. They curve, pressing in slightly. She sways, edging closer to him. “Yeah.”

His breath is caught in his throat. Her name nearly chokes in between his teeth: “Rey.”

Her eyes are bright and half-wild with something he can’t think to name when he leans into her, her lips soft and yielding as he presses his mouth against hers.

It’s chaste, for a moment—a barely-there pressure of smooth skin and the tacky taste of what must be her chapstick. Her fingers are still smoothed over his brow when her mouth opens, and he thinks he might hear her breathing his name, her breath warm on his mouth.

His hands move to her waist by themselves, and he moves closer, wanting more, needing more, slips his tongue between her teeth, rolling it against hers. He feels her gasp more than he hears it, feels the sharp inhalation of her breath when he digs his hands just under the hem of her sweater and drags them up, over the gentle curve of her spine, and back down again, repeating the motion until she’s shivering in his arms.

He’s dimly aware that they are still on a curb of a suburban street, but, really, everything seems to fade into nothing. Just the crisp bite of the wind and the hot movement of her mouth, her fingers curling into the hair at the nape of his neck and pulling until he makes a small noise of discomfort.

“Shit,” she mutters into his lips, “sorry.”

“S’fine,” he mumbles. She tastes like wine and popcorn, so different from the last time they did this, months ago, when her lips against his felt more like a war than a kiss. “Just—softer.”

She hums in agreement, her fingers unclenching, and tilts her head as she shifts positions, crawling near enough to throw one of her legs over his.

She straddles him there, in front of a house with what looks like a hundred bird feeders and a _NO SOLICITING_ sign—her knees around his hips, her thighs against his lap. She shimmies closer and closer until he gasps, his hands dropping from her back to curl around her upper thighs, the curve of her ass. His palms travel over the smooth expanse of her legs, from the bottom of her shorts to the tops of her socks, his knuckles scraping under the backs of her knees in a way that soon has her shaking, panting into his mouth.

She rocks against his lap, leveraging her weight with her arms tossed around his shoulders, and he tugs her closer, pressing her down into his growing hard-on.

He knows the moment she feels it, the way her hips stutter in the slow rhythm she’s set. 

She's breathless, panting, her lips brushing his chin when she mumbles, “You’re so hot, it makes me want to literally punch you in the face.”

His voice is just as quiet, almost afraid to speak any louder than a whisper, fearful that it might break the strangeness of this thing surrounding them. “So violent.”

“You said—” She pauses; he feels her fingertips dig into the muscle at the joint of his neck. “It’s still on the table. Right?”

His eyes are closed, despite the fact that she’s leaned away from him now. He swallows, trying not to focus on the pitch in his gut. “Yes.”

“Then,” she says, the sentence hardly a whisper, words slurring together at the ends, “you should take me home.”

His eyes open. She’s near enough that they have to cross, slightly, to see her face. How dark her eyes are, green edged out by brown and black; how her lips are swollen from too much attention and wet with spit. She sways on his lap, and he remembers she must have had as much alcohol as him, and he still feels strange. Dazed. Intoxicated.

It takes all his willpower and then some to ask, “How much have you had to drink?”

He watches her eyebrows knit together in apparent confusion. “I don’t know,” she says, the cadence of the reply near to laughter. “Enough.”

His stomach sinks the second she says it, falling somewhere around his feet. “Enough?” 

“Well, yeah.” Her expression shifts, changing too fast for him to read. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t think—” he starts, and she says, her voice overlapping his, “Let’s go, and we can—”

They both stop. He hears the crickets again, loud enough he wonders how he ever blocked them out. It takes him more than one try to get out, “It’s not a good idea, Rey.”

There’s an unmistakeable glint of anger in her eyes, in the set of her brow. “What? You’re the one who—you’ve been trying to sleep with me for months and when I finally agree—”

“I don’t make it a habit to sleep with girls who have had too much to drink,” he interrupts, trying to keep his voice firm.

Rey tilts back. It’s only another moment before she’s off of him completely, back to sit next to him on the curb and further away than before. “ _Girls_?” she repeats, incredulous. “I’m not some fucking _girl_.” He’s silent, watching her, feeling her slip further away with every passing second. “I don’t get it, Ben, you’re the one who’s been begging for sex—”

He grimaces, mouth turned down and harsh. “I don’t need to _beg_ for sex—”

“—and now I’m giving it to you on a silver platter and you can’t be fucking bothered?”

She stares at him, her arms crossed defensively over her chest. He stares back, trying to figure out how he managed to fuck things up so entirely, the way he does everything.

“I don’t fuck drunk women,” he says after a long moment.

She makes a noise of frustration from the back of her throat, her head tipped back, showing the long line of her throat. “I’m not _that_ drunk,” she insists hotly, glaring at him again. “It's not a problem, I'm perfectly capable of consenting, and—and isn't this what you _want_? Why can’t you just _take_ it?”

“I don’t want to _take_ it,” he says, feeling a wave of anger bubbling in the pit of his stomach.

“I’m _offering_. I’m—I'm way out on a fucking limb here, Ben.” When he stays stubbornly quiet, she throws her hands in the air, groaning. “What? Do you not—you don’t want this anymore? What happened to ‘getting rid of the tension’?”

“No, that’s not—” He shakes his head, hardly able to figure out what his own meaning, let alone how he could explain it to her. Because she's right, and he's wrong, and she's offering, so what's his fucking _problem_? “That’s not it.”

“So what is it then? What’s wrong with me now?” He doesn’t want to meet her eyes, can’t meet her eyes, nor can he look away, so he’s stuck, trapped somewhere between her and everything else. “Why don’t you just—why can’t you—”

He presses the heel of his palm into the hollow of his eye, hissing when it reopens the wound splitting his eyebrow, trailing across his cheek. “Because—”

“Because _what_?” she asks, heated, her voice lifted almost to a shout despite the quiet of the space around them, and he can’t help it then. It's like a car crashing, careening down a hill, backwards and on fire, and all he can think is how he didn't want it like _this_.

He snaps, “Because I don’t want it to happen just because of that!”

Her mouth falls open. “Ben,” she says.

Before he can say anything, figure out how to swallow every single word he just let spill out of him, she looks up over his shoulder, her attention drawn by the sound of footfalls behind him.

“We found them!” Ben hears Rose call as she and Finn walk closer. In her hand, he can see the box of bandages and a small tube of Neosporin. “Bandaids!” she announces, and then stops in her tracks as she approaches the two of them on the curb. Her brow furrows, clearly concerned she interrupted something. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Rey says, falsely cheery. “It’s nothing.”

And it was—is—nothing. So there's nothing else to add.

Ben shrugs by way of explanation.

“Okay.” The word is drawn out like Rose isn’t buying it, but luckily, she makes no further comment. “Come on, Ben, stand up. Let me fix you right quick.”

He stands, letting Rose bend his shoulders toward her so she can properly fuss over him. The tissues Rey let him use are somewhere on the ground, abandoned the moment he put his hands on her. From the corner of his eye, he sees her scoop them up, wrap them in a third tissue, and wad them up to shove into her pocket.

Its a few minutes before Rose considers him adequately bandaged, and in that time Rey and Finn drift to each other, speaking in hushed tones.

“So,” Rose says once she’s finished, allowing Ben to straighten back up. “What now?”

“I’m pretty tired,” Rey says quietly. “I think Finn and I are gonna go home. I called a Lyft, so.”

“Oh.” Rose shifts on her feet, seeming slightly put out. “Okay.”

“They’re not expecting us back, are they?”

“No, they’re pretty much done for the night,” Rose says quickly. “I just thought maybe we could all go get Taco Bell or something.”

“Maybe another time,” Finn says. “Rose, you wanna come with?”

She hesitates, then nods. “Yeah, sure, I’ll go. Ben, do you want to split the ride with us?”

Ben looks at the three of them standing together: Rose looking at him all kind and generous, Finn with his arms folded, Rey’s eyes lowered to the ground, studiously not meeting his gaze.

“No, I’m fine,” he hears himself say, as if from far away. “I don’t want you to go out of your way.”

“It’s no trouble,” Rose offers, and Ben shakes his head, taking a step back.

“I’m okay. Really.”

“You’re good, Solo?” Finn asks, sounding perhaps slightly more concerned than before.

Ben’s mouth is dry. He makes sure not to look at Rey when he tells them, “Yeah, I’m fine. You guys go ahead.”

Rose cocks her head, as if considering him. “Okay,” she says after a long moment. “Well, it was good to see you. Be careful about that head wound, alright?”

He nods. “Yeah. Thanks, Rose.”

“Okay. See you!”

He holds up his hand in an approximation of a wave, turning his attention to his phone as they walk to the end of the block to meet up with their ride. It takes him three tries to open the stupid lock screen, and even longer to find the right app. His hands are shaking, and he keeps hearing it no matter how much he tries to push it out of his head— _why can’t you just take it?_

He still doesn’t have an answer. Even when his ride finally shows, even when he makes it back to his apartment and lays alone in his bed, staring straight in front of him. There is something wrong with him, really wrong: his heart descended down the length of his spine, his head pounding. Whatever it is, he's going to fix it, change it. If she's still interested, if she still wants to—he'll figure out a way to get her back to the place she was in tonight.

He'll get it the fuck out of his system.

His eyes track the smooth surface of the ceiling, and he thinks of his hands on Rey’s body, on her waist, on the place at the back of her knees that made her shiver, until he finally falls into a fitful, restless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Oh, honey, do. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBNCgEouRLg)


	22. the kissing hand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am on twitter now! @janedazey! it’s all coming together.......
> 
> this is another chapter wherein they do some things in a school building (high school this time because i cannot in good conscience write smut in an elementary school) that are........extremely inappropriate to say the least. extremely. those with more delicate constitutions may not appreciate it
> 
> please note the rating bump to E!

** 22\. the kissing hand**

A Google search regarding the etiquette surrounding directly messaging someone using a number gleaned from a group chat yields no truly fruitful results. However, it does serve the purpose of introducing Ben to a number of memes surrounding the concept of, quote unquote, “sliding into one’s DMs”—a rabbit hole that he falls into for about twenty minutes, just to ensure his afternoon is entirely wasted.

He begins to compose no fewer than ten messages to send to her, messages that sound a bit too much like begging, or like he desperately wants her, or like he’d do anything if she’d just ask him again when they’re both sober, just so he can know that she really wants it. Wants _him_.

He sends none of them.

There is a part of him—a small, irritatingly stubborn part of him—that hopes she might contact him, instead of the other way around.

She doesn’t.

His father does call, though. On Sunday evening, while Ben is in the middle of chopping garlic for dinner, to ask Ben to go to an Angels spring training game with him and Chewie.

Ben can’t think of any good reason to say no, aside from the fact that it’s right in the middle of his spring break, so he agrees. It’s not like he has any other plans.

“Great!” Han says instantly, his voice loud and booming even over the phone. “It’s a date! And speaking of dates,” he goes on, faux-casual, “have you been going on any real dates?”

 _Jesus_. “Dad,” he groans.

“Aw, don’t worry, kid. I’m just fucking with you.”

Ben snorts. “Don’t let Mom hear you say that.”

“What, ‘fucking’? I’m a grown man, I can say whatever I choose.” Han clears his throat. “But she’s at book club anyway, so.”

Ben rolls his eyes. “Of course.”

“I really am just teasing, Ben,” Han says, suddenly serious. “I’m not trying to push you into anything you’re not comfortable with.”

Ben sighs, moving to rub his temples and then dropping his hand back down once he realizes he never let go of his knife. He doesn't need to slice up his face again, not with the first cut still healing over. “It’s fine.”

Han hesitates, sounding very much like a man hedging his bets. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Ben says quietly. “I know.”

Han pauses, the silence on his end of the line loaded and deliberate. “Is there anything you want to talk to me about?”

“I—no.”

Another pause, weightier than the first. “Alright, kid,” Han says slowly. “Well, I’m gonna let you go—”

Before he can even think to stop himself, Ben pipes up, “Actually, I was—”

He freezes, teeth biting the inside of his cheek.

What would he even say about it? Where would he even begin? It’s not like he wants his old man’s advice about how to get laid. And it’s not like he wants—

It’s not like he wants to _date_ her.

His father waits; Ben can hear his breathing through the receiver. “Yeah?”

Ben shakes his head, letting the knife clatter back onto the marble cutting board. “Never mind,” he says. “It’s not important. I’ll—I’ll see you at the game.”

Something that sounds too much like a sigh floats across the line. “Alright, Ben,” Han mumbles. “If you think of it before then, just let me know.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“See you then, kiddo.”

Ben hangs up first, letting his phone slip out of his fingers and onto the kitchen counter. After a moment, he goes back to chopping the garlic, careful not to let the knife slip.

Sunday night drips by, slow as honey.

Kyle is out the entire week before spring break to visit his father in Palo Alto, same as last year, so there is no reason for Ben to go to the lower school at all.

So he doesn’t go. He doesn’t go, and he doesn’t see Rey anywhere, not even in passing in or out of the building. And he doesn’t hear from her, through the group message or otherwise. And he doesn’t text her.

There is a part of him—a big part, a significant part, a part that demands to be paid the proper attention—that tells him to grow a pair and just talk to her. Just lay it all out on the table and tell her how he feels. How he wants the chance to show her what she’s been missing, how he’d give anything to make her come, how he wants to chain her to his bed and drive her out of her mind with pleasure, and take her out to dinner afterwards and listen to her laugh and _Jesus Christ_ , he does not like where his thoughts are going, what happened to _just once_?

Whatever, he decides. Brains are stupid sometimes.

Ben ignores that part of himself. He spends the week ignoring that part of himself, and he doesn’t run into Rey, and he’s completely and totally _fine_ with it. He’s basically, he thinks, moved on, and forgotten all about her.

Until Friday, when she all but barges into his office after the final bell.

Ben is already done for the day, for the week, basically for the year. The two months after spring break are notoriously difficult to get through, and he plans on taking advantage of every single moment he spends outside of the school building.

He’s packed everything he needs into his bag, shut down his computer, filed all the paperwork he needed to file and updated all the cases he needed to update, and he’s just about to open the door to his office and get the hell out of dodge when the handle twists, and it opens into him instead, nearly whacking him in the face.

He reels back, narrowly avoiding being bludgeoned by the door, and he hears, in a very distinctive English accent, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I had no idea you were right there!”

He straightens back up as quickly as he can, resting his hand on the doorknob as if he had been the one to invite her in. “Rey,” he says, like an idiot.

Still standing in the arch of the doorway, Rey stares at him. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “I should’ve knocked. I just keep...injuring you.” She fidgets, rubbing one hand self-consciously up and down her forearm, over and over. She’s not wearing an apron, he registers—just a cute little button-up dress that cinches with a tie at her waist and ends below her knees. Her earrings look like actual, edible strawberries; she’s still wearing the most hideous clogs known to man. All in all, perfectly modest. “Your face is healing up nicely, though,” she says weakly.

He definitely shouldn’t be picturing how that dress would look on the floor of his bedroom. He’s at work, for god’s sake—even if technically he’s no longer on the clock.

“Hi,” she says, lifting her hand.

He blinks. “Hi,” he manages after an overlong moment. “Sorry, what—” He clears his throat, uncomfortable. “What are you doing here?”

She rocks back and forth on her heels. “Can I come in?”

He nods, stepping back so she can stroll a few feet into his office. He shuts the door as she passes, and then, after a moment of half-agonized deliberation, locks it.

Ben turns around, eyeing Rey with some trepidation as she lingers by his desk, her fingers skimming over his stapler.

“I didn’t want to have this conversation over text,” she says quietly, something in her voice sounding almost rueful. “So I didn’t text. I thought I’d catch you in hallway, but it seemed like—” She shrugs. “Like maybe you were trying to avoid me.”

“Kyle wasn’t in school this week. I didn’t—there wasn’t any real reason for me to go to the lower school.” _Even though I wanted to_ , he doesn’t say.

She nods. “I found that out when I had his class today, and—and then, I just—it felt like it had been too many days without talking about—about _it_ , and it would be awkward—and so—yeah.”

He cocks his head, confused, half-dazed from her unending, impossible-to-decipher, run-on sentence. “‘Yeah’ what?”

She takes a deep breath; he watches the rise and fall of her shoulders, the bob of her throat as she swallows. “So I came here,” she finishes, somewhat lamely.

He hesitates—then takes a small step closer to her. “I can see that.”

“I wanted to talk. About what happened. I wanted to—” She bites her lip, for a brief moment, then forges ahead. “I wanted to apologize. And thank you.”

His eyebrows tilt together. Of all the reactions he had expected from her when they ran into each other again—anger or annoyance or frustration or maybe, in his most ridiculous fantasies, horniness—gratitude definitely wasn’t something he’d anticipated. “Thank me?”

She nods, seeming more confident than before. “You were right, last weekend,” she says. “When you said it wasn’t a good idea. We had both been drinking, and I didn’t take the—rejection well, and—and everything. And you were right. Us—” She stammers slightly, fumbling over her words, and his eyes widen as he watches a flush spread across her freckles— “having sex—it’s—it’s not a good idea. For lots of reasons, so. So I wanted to talk to you in person so I could thank you for saying no and not trying to...take advantage when you had the opportunity. You’re a decent man, Ben. A good person. So thank you for that.”

He tries not to let too much bitterness, too much disbelief, color his reply. “Right.”

And it’s like she sees right through him, the way she always has—as if she knows every single bad thing he’s ever done and means it anyway when she says, more strongly, “You are, Ben. You’re a good guy. I was rude and abrasive, and you were just trying to look out for me and make sure I was in my right mind. Not everyone would do that, and I really do appreciate it.” She shrugs and lowers her eyes, letting her hand drift from the stapler to the stack of folders at the corner of the desk before it falls away entirely. “Anyway,” she says, more to the ground than to his face, “that’s all I came to say.”

Rey nods firmly once again, as if to punctuate what she came to say. She gives him a wider berth than strictly necessary as she walks back to the door, and it’s then, when she’s barely even taken three steps, that he asks her, “What reasons?”

She stops almost instantly. Raises her head, one perfect, loose curl falling over her eye before she brushes it out of the way. “Pardon?”

Ben edges closer, just barely, his hands tucked in his pockets. “What are the reasons it’s not a good idea? You said there were a lot.”

“Well. It’s.” She huffs out a small breath, her eyes darting away and back to his, like she can’t quite look at him directly just as she can’t quite look away. “There’s a lot of things to consider.”

“Yeah? Like what.”

“Like...it’d be...weird. When we see each other. If we’ve...” She leans ever-so-slightly to one side and crosses her arms, a hand fluttering vaguely in the air. “Had sex.”

Ben shrugs. “Maybe.”

“And...we don’t really get along very well. Or, well,” she contradicts herself immediately, “maybe—we’ve been getting along better now, but, you know, there’s a history there. Where we hate each other.”

He nods seriously. “You’re right about that.”

“And it’s...a bad idea.”

“So you’ve said.”

Rey sighs, exasperated, and he can see her suppressing a small grin. “Stop that.”

The corner of his mouth lifts in a half-smile, glad to be in familiar territory when he replies, “Stop what?”

“Being all agreeable.”

He takes a step closer to her, and she doesn't lean away. She only raises her chin to better meet his eyes, and he _likes_ that. He really, really likes that. “You want me to disagree with you?”

Her breath seems to catch in the long column of her throat. “Yes,” she says.

Another step, him or her. He can’t tell which of them moved, just that now they’re near enough that he can see better the blush painting her cheeks and neck pink, how her eyes seem impossibly huge and dark. His hands, in his pockets, itch to move. “Let’s have sex.”

“Why?” She sounds almost as drunk as she was on Saturday, breathless and dazed. Her arms, now unfolded, twitch at her sides.

“Because,” he says softly, gentle as anything, “we both want to.” One last step, and their bodies are almost touching, her mouth just _there_ , deliciously tempting. Utterly indecent, the things he wants to do to her. Inappropriate for the workspace. _Obscene_. “Don’t you want to get what you want, Rey?” he asks her in a voice gone low and dark. “For once?”

There’s a moment, a long moment, where Ben wonders if he’s pushed her too far. If she’ll leave completely, realize suddenly that he’s not worth even a few stolen moments of her time. If she’ll finally know how much he’s been craving it, all the attention, good or bad or _anything_ , just so long as it’s hers. If she’ll see right through him the way she did, the way she does, and understand just how truly unbearably _bad_ it’s gotten, just how much of a hold she has on him. He wonders if she’ll make him _beg_.

He might. He would, if she asked him.

She doesn’t.

“Fuck it,” she breathes.

The words have barely left her lips before she’s launching herself into him, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck, but he’s already there, right there, rushing into the kiss the same as her, and then it’s nothing but teeth and tongues and open, gasping mouths. The taste of her now almost familiar; the swipe of her tongue around the seam of his lips something he’s felt before. He wants more, always more of her, whatever he can get. Whatever she’s willing to give him.

“Just once, right?” she mumbles into his mouth, her speech broken up by the way she can’t seem to stop kissing him. She shivers as his hands make their way up her spine, curling around her shoulders to grip her even tighter. “To get—for the tension?”

He nods, frantic, mindless, and he thinks he’d probably agree to anything she asked of him now as long as this doesn’t stop— “Yeah, it’s—we’ll do whatever you want, Rey.”

“Finn already went home with Rose,” she tells him, leaning back enough to meet his eyes properly. He furrows his brow, not quite following her meaning until she continues, “I can follow your car. Just let me—tonight, Ben, tonight, _please_ —”

“Yes,” he says, almost tripping over his words, “ _fuck_ , yes. Come over tonight.”

She grins, and he can’t help it. Can’t help but kiss the smile off her face, his larger body curling over her smaller one like an apostrophe. He’s stumbling in both the figurative and literal sense, completely undone by the thought of it—Rey, in his bed, tonight, finally, finally, _finally_. He barely even notices they’ve walked into his desk until she makes a torn sound of shock into the kiss, her body jolting against his as she half-sits on the edge.

“Let me just—” His hands splay out on the back of her thighs, over the fabric of her dress, and she makes that sweet little noise again as he lifts her a few inches to sit back on his desk. “One thing,” he says, nipping his way across her jaw, down the line of her throat.

“What?” she asks, almost panting the word.

“I want—need to feel you. Sweetheart, just let me—”

Rey gasps when his hands move further up the inside of her thighs, dragging her dress up to expose more and more skin. He leans back, catching her eye, and searches her expression as he slowly, carefully, slips one hand between her legs, disappearing under her skirt.

They groan, both of them, when his fingers stroke lightly over thin, damp cotton.

“Fuck,” she hisses, spreading her legs wide enough for him to stand between them, “ _fuck_.”

“Is this alright?” He brushes his knuckle more deliberately, circling her clit through the flimsy fabric. She lets out a little whine, her hands coming up to clutch at his upper arms, clawing at his shirt. “Rey, can I—”

“Yes,” she gasps, “yes, god, your _hands_ —”

He peels the gusset of her panties to the side, and her nails dig in deeper, scrambling for purchase somewhere on his body. Ben wraps his free arm around her back, holding her up. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, don’t worry, sweetheart—”

The sound that comes out of her when he drags his middle finger through her folds experimentally—he already knows it’s going to ruin his life. Haunt his god damn dreams. It’s even worse, how absolutely _drenched_ she is; he’s never going to get it out of his mind, the way she feels. Heavenly. Fucking sublime.

“You’re soaked.” His voice is wrecked, a ruin, just like the rest of him. He’s never been more turned on in his life, and he’s barely even touched her. “So wet, so fucking _wet._ ”

“Ben—your fingers inside, inside me, Ben.”

The skirt of her dress is far too long. He has to gather up more than one fistful of fabric before her legs are bare, spread open wide enough to show off the lips of her pretty pink cunt. Her hips twitch, canting into his hand when he slides one finger inside, torturously slow, and she's so tight, so _tight_ around his fingers he almost loses it right then. She keens, slapping her wrist over her mouth to muffle the sound when he curls his finger inside and starts to move, pressing rest of his knuckles against the bud of her clit.

Ben barely knows what he’s saying. It spills out of him too fast to stop, too much to take back, “—just how I thought you’d be, you feel—god, even better than I imagined—so _wet_ and _hot_ and _tight_ —so fucking _good,_ fucking _perfect—_ ”

She's panting softly, sounding almost drugged when she asks, “You thought about it?”

Her eyes are wide, meeting his gaze. And he can’t lie, not when she’s looking at him like that.

“Yes,” he admits. “All the time. All the fucking time.” As he strokes back, he adds his ring finger alongside his middle, hooking them inside until her whole body jolts. He sounds almost angry with her when he confesses, “Couldn’t fucking _sleep_ because of you.”

Her voice is so quiet, he almost doesn’t hear her say, “Me too.”

His thoughts are a jumble, chaotic and utterly disastrous, but they grind to a halt at her words: _me too, me too, me too_.

“I dreamed about this,” he says, his voice almost cracked in half, “how you’d fuck my hand—”

He pulls back and out of her, and Rey _whines_ , shimmying closer as if to keep him there. He smirks, and slips his middle and ring fingers into his mouth, sucking them clean of her sweet, slick taste before returning them to her cunt, thrusting into her harder than before. 

“Oh, god,” she whimpers, the sound so sweet and soft that he almost wants to _die._ He can’t take it, he can’t, and he’s not even fucking her yet, not even really inside her, “oh god oh god oh god—”

“Thought about eating your cunt, too. Will you let me do that, sweetheart?” He rubs her clit with his thumb, as if to show her where he means. “Let me eat this sweet little cunt?”

Her whole body jumps, all of her weight now in the arm keeping her upright, keeping her close.

“N—not here,” she manages between gasps for air. 

“In my bed,” he assures her, slowing his fingers through the tight heat of her, grinding her clit with his thumb until moans are eking out of her continuously, every breath out of her mouth a whimper. “I want to take my time,” he tells her, now so unbearably hard he can hardly see straight, “lick your wet fucking pussy until you come in my mouth over and over and _over_.”

Her legs tense, her thighs shaking.

“Fuck, Ben, right there, like that—”

He keeps his hand working, watching with so much damn satisfaction as she grinds herself down on his hand, her palms pressed back onto his desk. She’s knocked some of his things over, but he could not care less, his focus limited to her and her alone.

“I’ll fuck you,” he tells her, each word punctuated with a smooth slide of his hand, “fill you up.”

Hazel eyes drift shut, her head tipping back.

“Look at me,” he demands, tearing his arm away from her back to tug gently at the nape of her neck. “Rey, look at me.”

She opens her eyes, letting out a beautiful little noise when she meets his gaze again. “I’m gonna—you’re gonna make me come—”

“Come then,” he says, and it sounds too much like begging but he’s long past caring about that. She has to know by now, how much he’d do for this. How he’d do—god, _anything_ for this. For her. “Come on my fingers, take what you need, baby, I want to feel it—come for me, Rey, _please_ —”

He feels her cunt flutter and tighten, around his hand, feels her entire body clench up, rigid. Her mouth falls open, but she’s pressed the heel of her palm against it to muffle the way she almost screams, high and keening—and then she’s _coming_ , rocking on his desk to draw out her orgasm, grinding shamelessly.

He helps her through it, working her until she drops her hand, still wet from her own saliva, onto his forearm to slow him down.

She’s dripped down over him, almost to his wrist. Feels like water between his fingers, open and gushing.

He drops his forehead onto her shoulder, taking a shuddering breath, while she tilts forward, leaning into him.

He feels her little hand tracking down his torso, reaching for the erection tenting the front of his slacks. He grabs her wrist loosely before she can get there, and then adjusts himself, wincing.

She freezes; he can hear how shallow her breathing is. “Don’t you want me to—”

“Yes,” he says. “God, yes. But not—not here.”

“We can just...you know.” He feels her grin against his skin, where the collar of his shirt is parted. “While we’re at it.”

He shakes his head, swallowing. “If we’re—” And he can’t bring himself to say it, _if we’re only fucking once_.

It’s right then. Right then that he knows for sure: that once won’t be enough. Not for him.

He jerks his head again, continuing, “I’m not fucking you in a high school.”

She laughs, and it makes something in him thump, bruising, against his ribs. Maybe his heart. “Oh, but fingering is acceptable?”

“Fingering is acceptable anywhere,” he grins. “As long as you don’t get caught.”

“What about in church?”

“Fuck, yeah. Show those priests what they’re missing out on.”

She giggles again, then whines as he finally pulls his hand out of her, wiping her come against the inside of her thigh. Letting his palm skate across her leg, down to cup her knee. “At a wake?”

“What better way to celebrate a life than some good old-fashioned fingerbanging?”

She snorts, tugging her panties back into place. She wriggles off his desk, and if he doesn’t quite give her enough room to get down without rubbing against him, well. He’s only human.

“I could blow you,” she offers, so casual he almost chokes.

“A kind overture,” he replies once he’s managed to collect himself. “But again, I’d rather not ejaculate in my office. I do have to work here again in a week, you know.”

She shrugs, letting her dress fall back over her legs. “Suit yourself.”

There’s the noise of something clattering to the ground, and Ben looks down, watching as a little toy car rolls across the floor.

“Oh, shit,” Rey says. She bends down to pocket the toy again, her cheeks flushed with mild embarrassment. “Forgot to give that back to Lennon.”

Ben feels himself making a face. “Lenin? Like...Vladimir?”

Her smile bright and wide. Just for him. There's that feeling again—the heart thing. Right up against his ribcage. “No. Jesus. Like _John_ Lennon.”

“Still a terrible name,” he mumbles, straightening the collar of his shirt. The sleeves, he already knows, will wrinkle from the force of how she gripped the fabric. A small price to pay, he thinks; he’s also already planning a time to iron out the creases.

She nods, serious, and reties the bow on her dress. “Agreed.”

They stand there, for a moment, just—looking at each other.

Rey breaks the quiet first, eyes darting away from him before she gets out in a rush, “So I’ll just follow your car to your flat, yeah?”

He nods. “Yeah. Wait, let me—” He tugs his phone from his back pocket and shakily types his address into a new message to Rey Jackson. Her phone dings where it's buried in the folds of her dress. “In case we lose each other,” he explains.

Her lips twist, her eyes lit up in a way he can’t quite read. “Thanks,” she murmurs.

Her hands brush down her front, as if checking to make sure she looks acceptable again. Her hair is...something of a disaster, but he’s reasonably sure they might be some of the only people left in the building, so he lets it slide.

She glances back to him when he reaches the door, an eyebrow lifted. “You coming?”

“Yeah,” he says, perhaps an octave too high. “Yeah, I just need a second to...cool off.”

Her grin stretches wider. “Oh, do you?”

He cracks a smile, despite himself. “Shut up, Jackson.”

She unlocks and opens the door behind her, still half-smiling. “I’m going to run down to my room, but...I’ll see you in a minute?”

He nods again, watching as she lifts her hand in a small goodbye before she walks out and lets the door swing shut.

Ben takes a breath, scrubbing a hand over his face. Fuck, he can still smell her, still feel her on his fingers. _Everywhere_ , she’s fucking _everywhere_ in his office.

He’s never going to get her out.

Once won’t be enough. He knows now it never would have been; if she thinks that he’ll be able to just let her go afterwards, just get rid of the tension and be done with it—Christ. Fucking her definitely won’t do anything to fix the problem. Probably just make it worse, like scratching a mosquito bite.

He already knows he’s going to do it anyway.

He takes one last breath, steadying himself, and gathers up his things to join her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I’m gonna make a mistake. I’m gonna do it on purpose. ](https://youtu.be/pokyLl-633o)


	23. the best mistake ever! and other stories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> am i gonna become one of those people who shamelessly self-promotes??? fuck yeah. follow me on twitter!!! [ @janedazey!!! ](https://twitter.com/janedazey) you will get to experience my trademark inane commentary in real time
> 
> ALSO forgot to mention!!!!!!!! frak-all made a BEAUTIFUL [ moodboard ](https://twitter.com/AllFrak/status/1254516830552686594) for this fic!!! so did a beautiful breakdown [ here!!!!!! ](https://twitter.com/ABeautifulBrea1/status/1254929134393921542)LOOK AT THEM NOW
> 
> in the meanwhile, here, have several thousand words of porn

** 23\. the best mistake ever! and other stories**

Rey will not stop talking.

Not that Ben is complaining. It’s kind of cute, actually, the way she starts babbling the second she sees him waiting by his building for her to park, throughout the ride in the elevator, all the way down the hall and while she waits for him to open the door to his apartment. 

She goes on and on about the plant life surrounding the front entrance—does he know if that is a community garden? Do they have tomatoes? Does he think anyone would notice if she went in and stole a few grapes off the vine?—about the number of floors in his building—is he on the top floor? Are the flats fancier up there? How does he afford to live here on a high school counselor’s salary? Oh sorry, that was a rude question, nevermind—and even about the doormat just outside of his apartment—it is preposterous that he has a doormat that says GO AWAY in big black letters, like he is poking fun at his own reputation for being prickly, which begs the question of where he has been hiding his sense of humor—but the second the door creaks open and he gestures for her to go inside, her jaw snaps shut with an audible click.

The sudden silence is deafening. He can actually hear her swallow.

He can’t do the things he usually does with the women he brings here, the rare times he has women over. Normally, he’d ask if she’d like a drink. Normally, he’d lead her over to his couch, make inane small talk about what they both do for a living, or about where she’s from, or about how many siblings she has—dumb little details he doesn’t care about and won’t remember. Normally, he’d take her to his room without giving it too much thought.

He can’t do that with Rey though. He doesn’t want to drink with her before they have sex for the first time (he can’t think of it as the only time, even now, he just—can’t); he already knows the answer to all of his usual first date questions. Ben feels in outer space, here. In uncharted waters.

There is a moment of tense quiet, and then Ben blurts out abruptly, “Do you want anything to eat?”

Rey turns back as he kicks the door shut, the corner of her mouth slanting up. “Sure,” she says quietly. “You don’t mind?”

He offers her a half-grin, and her smile grows. “Of course not.”

In his kitchen, she seems to find her voice again, thankfully. She makes idle jokes about his fridge—“Is this the kind that you can tweet from? Can I pretend that you’re holding me hostage and this fridge is the only method I have to communicate with the outside world?”—and about his spice rack, of all things—“Look at you, keeping all your things all neat and organized, so sophisticated.” She hops up onto the counter as he searches for something quick and easy, something to break the ice more than it’s already been broken. Something to say, _hey, I know it’s weird that we’re about to have sex after going so long with so much tension, but maybe it’ll be less weird if we share something to eat immediately beforehand? But not something so time-consuming or filling that we don’t want to have sex after eating it._

It’s a tricky balance to strike.

Rey solves the problem before he does, grabbing at the bowl of fruit he, luckily, just restocked. She looks through the bowl, pulling out avocados and mangos and a honeycrisp apple that barely fits in her hand, smirking at each one as she lays it out in a row beside her.

“Are you seriously the kind of person that buys extra as fuck fruit just for the hell of it?” she asks, deadpan.

“Yes,” he replies seriously. “I do have an image to maintain.”

“As a shill for Whole Foods?”

“Yep. You’ve figures out my deep, dark secret. I’m a plant.”

“Just as I suspected,” she says lightly, and then smiles blindingly when she finds a dragonfruit underneath an oversized papaya. She hefts it out, tripping her fingertips over the spikes covering the toughened magenta skin. “I love these things,” she says, glancing up at him briefly. “But they’re like four dollars for one.”

Ben shrugs, grabbing the dragonfruit from her hands, letting his fingers brush against hers as he does. The same fingers that were inside of her less than an hour ago, dripping with her come. Based on the way she blushes, she seems to be remembering the same thing.

He busies himself rinsing the fruit off in the sink and pulling out a knife to cut it in half. “This isn’t the kind of thing you can just gnaw through,” he says, smirking, and she gasps.

“Are you making fun of the way I eat?” She narrows her eyes and shakes her head. “And right when I was finally about to have sex with you.”

“Is that what you’re doing here?”

“That was rather the idea. What color do you think it will be?” she asks, changing the subject on a dime.

Ben pauses as he lifts the knife, frowning. “What?”

“The dragonfruit.” She raises her eyebrows, those sweet dimples that drive him insane appearing on her cheeks as she tries to keep herself from smiling too obviously. “Will it be pink or white on the inside, so you think?”

“Usually they’re white,” he says. “I think there’s supposedly a way to tell, but I don’t know it. It’s probably white.”

“Wanna bet?”

He places the knife back onto the cutting board. The way Rey is sitting—legs crossed primly, hands gripping the edge of the counter as she grins mischievously at him—she looks so annoyingly _cute_. She looks like his damn dream girl.

Ben shakes his head, trying to shake himself of this extremely idiotic thought. “I’ll bite,” he says. “What are the stakes?”

She cocks her head, her eyes bright and pleased. “It’s your kitchen,” she says. “You tell me.”

Ben pretends to think this over as he moves closer to her. He watches her face closely, searching her expression as he places his hands beside her hips on the counter, effectively caging her in. Rey just continues to give him that teasing little smile.

“How about this,” he starts. He’s careful not to lean into her space, keeping his palms flat on the black marble. He thinks this could be construed as flirting. He thinks they might be flirting. “If I cut this, and the inside is pink, I’ll eat you out here, on top of my kitchen counter.”

Her chest rises and falls quickly, her breath growing short and shallow. “And if it’s not?” she asks, her voice tremulous and wanting.

“I’ll do it in bed.”

Her eyebrows knit together. “That hardly seems fair.”

“How so?” His hands shift from the counter to the tops of her knees. He gently uncrosses her legs, easing her thighs apart. The skirt of her dress falls into the space between her legs, keeping her perfectly decent, but he can see the flush blooming over her delicate features.

“I win either way,” she protests, even as her legs fall open wider, welcoming him to step between them. “Shouldn’t one of the options be something for you?”

He huffs out a small puff of laughter as he rolls the hem of her dress over her knees, watching the muscles jumping in her thighs as he inches his fingers along the sensitive skin. There’s no way, he thinks, no way he’ll be able to stick to his promise of just once. “Sweetheart, trust me. They’ll both be for me.”

He hears it then, the catch of her breath in her throat. When his eyes flicker to hers, he almost loses his mind at the sight of her. How black her hazel eyes are, how intent and needy. “Then cut it open and see,” she tells him, the words barely louder than a whisper.

Ben doesn’t move away from her—just grabs the knife and the fruit and slices down in one smooth motion.

Rey doesn’t look away from his face, her expression dark and curious as she watches him grin.

“Here then,” he breathes.

His heart pounds somewhere at the bottom of his throat. He tugs off her underwear, peeling them down her thighs and off her ankles, and for all the times he's imagined this, for all the times he's come to the thought of her mouth, her tits, her pussy, he never quite pictured it like this. He never could have anticipated the way she looks at him, her expression excited and nervous and gently pleased, or how her legs shiver when he spreads them wider and pulls her forward to sit at the edge of the counter.

When he kneels in front of her—when her fingers thread through the locks of his hair and her entire body tenses at the first swipe of his tongue through her folds and her mouth falls open in a sweet little noise of pure desire—Ben wonders how she could have possibly thought this wouldn't be for him, too.

She's the most beautiful thing he's ever had in this stupid fucking kitchen. In his entire apartment. In his entire life.

There's a cluster of freckles on the inside of her thigh, and he wants to know how many people know that, how many people have gotten close enough. The way she squirms under his attention when he starts licking her clit, keening loud enough that he feels it all the way down through his spine, in his cock, and claps her hand over her mouth—something tells him not many have made it this far.

It makes him far more pleased than it should.

“Are you—” Her sentence is cut off when he sucks at her clit, breaking into a whine that has her tightening her grip on his hair to the point of pain. Ben suckles the little bud into his mouth, relishing the way she bites her lip and _moans_ when she meets his dark-eyed gaze. “Are you sure you want— _oh, fuck_ —you know you don’t have to— _god_ —”

“Yes,” he murmurs into her cunt, lapping softly at the pretty wet lips of her sex between words, “yes, I want to, I've _been_ wanting to.” He presses a kiss to the inside of her thigh that is almost chaste. “Thought about this for so long, Rey.”

Her little fingers curl around his chin, gently tilting his head so he can look her in the eye. She looks so...different. Young and uncertain.

“It’s just—I know men don’t like to, you know.” He furrows his brow, and she sighs, flushing. “Go down. There.”

Ben blinks. After a moment, he stands up, licking his lips clean of her taste. Rey’s eyes darken further as he bends over her, holding her gaze steadily. “How many men have you slept with, exactly?”

“Well,” she says slowly. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On if...hand stuff counts.”

 _Jesus Christ_. Ben can’t tell if her obvious lack of experience is alluring or disconcerting. Possibly both. “I don’t count as someone you’ve slept with if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not _you_ ,” she says testily. “Other guys.”

“Alright, alright.” Ben rests his hands on her thighs, rubbing soothing circles over her smooth, tan skin. “Hand stuff counts. How many?”

She’s quiet for a moment, then murmurs softly, “Three.”

“ _Three_?” His voice cracks embarrassingly in the middle of the word, and Ben clears his throat, shaking his head. “How many if you’re not including handjobs?”

If it’s even possible, her voice gets softer. “Two.”

Fuck. _Fuck_.

He edges away from her slightly, leaning back so he can see her expression more fully. It takes every ounce of his control for him to ask, “Are you...sure? About this?”

Rey nods quickly. “Yes, I am. I want—I want to.”

He’s so hard now that it almost _hurts_. He leans into her body, dipping his head to mouth at her collarbone, his fingers slipping to the top of her dress to undo the first few buttons. So, yeah, maybe knowing that he’s going to be the third man _ever_ to be inside her is more of a turn-on than he’d care to admit. He feels almost dizzy when he finally manages to get out, “And how many of them got to lick this pretty little cunt?”

Rey sounds breathless, soft and wanting, when she replies, “One.”

“How many times?” His hand slips back to trace through the wet slick of her pussy, and Rey cries out, her hands clutching at his shoulders. “How many times, Rey?” he demands.

“Only once,” she gasps, “he didn’t like it, and it didn’t feel—” Her head lolls back when he tears the front of her dress open, tugging the cups of her flimsy plain bra down to tease her nipples into soft little peaks with his tongue. God, he wants to fit her pretty tits in his mouth. “ _Fuck_ —”

“Fuck,” he hisses. The buttons on her dress are finally undone down to her waist, and he lifts her off the counter, tugging the sleeves until she rolls them off of her shoulders, letting the fabric pool around her feet. He kneads the globes of her ass with his hands, pulling her up and into his arms so he can carry her to his bedroom. “ _Fuck,_ Rey, you have just—no idea how much I want you.”

The stumble through his living room is uncoordinated at best, but Ben hardly even cares. He’s entirely unwilling to lift his hands off of any part of her, particularly when every time he pulls her up higher to mouth at her tits it earns him another high-pitched whine.

She’s still whimpering when he tosses her onto the bed, a squeak tumbling out of her mouth when he tugs her forward to line her ass up with the edge of the bed while he kneels. A fucking dream, she’s exactly what he imagined, everything that he wanted—

“Ben—” God, she’s _moaning_ , moaning his name, her whole body jumping when he lowers his mouth to her pussy again and _dives_ in, his name in her lips sounding like the best kind of sex, _Jesus Christ_ , he’s having sex with Rey, “Ben, oh god—”

She presses her wrist against her lips, stifling the sounds of her whimpers as he tongues her clit hard, his palm flat on her abdomen to keep her in place. He reaches up with his other hand, peels her arm away from her face. “Don’t do that,” he mumbles into her wet folds, “baby, tell me what feels good.”

Her body curls around his head, her heels skating down his back. “Like how you did before,” she groans, “when you—sucked—”

The moment he pulls her clit into his mouth again, flicking his tongue softly over the bundle of nerves, her entire body jolts.

Ben glances up, meeting her eyes, and she keens.

“Good?”

“Good,” she gasps, “good, keep going.”

“Like this?” he teases, smirking.

“Yes, like this.” He slows, shifting from focused flicks to long, deep strokes with the flat of his tongue. “Fuck, Ben, if you don’t shut up and—”

Her voice pitches into a squeal when he slides a finger inside her, the noise edging into a scream when he sucks her clit between his lips again. He can feel the way her hands grasp desperately at the sheets, at his shoulders, at his hair. The way her cunt clenches and flutters around the finger he has hooked inside her, brushing the soft front wall of her channel. He could become addicted to this—to her sweet taste, her breathless noises, her legs draped over his shoulders. He could do this forever, wants to do this forever—but it’s barely another minute before her body is locking up again, tensing the way it did in his office, and he feels her come and _come_ , a slick gush around his hand.

It’s everything. _Everything_. He’ll never get it out of his head. And now she’s in his bed, and he’s going to fuck her, and he’ll never get her out, oh _god_.

He gently mouths at her folds as she eases down, her stomach rising and falling under his palm.

Ben crawls over her body, lifting her under her back to push her higher up the bed. His shoes are still on, his tie still tied, and he fumbles to rid himself of his clothing, needing to be touching every inch of her.

“Why are you still wearing clothes?” she whines, tugging roughly at his belt and zipper while he hurries to strip off his tie and button down.

She palms the outline of his cock through his boxer briefs and he almost topples over onto her, his breath leaving him in a strangled groan as her little hand works—first over the fabric, and then under the elastic, her fingers circling his cock.

She sits up when he stands beside the mattress and finally manages to kick off his shoes and pants, tugging down his underwear to let his hard-on spring free. The way her eyes widen at the sight of it is somehow both comical and extremely fucking satisfying.

She blinks up at him, her cheeks rosy and flushed, mouth wet and bitten red. “Am I right in feeling that if I ask if that’ll fit you’ll never let me hear the end of it?”

“Very,” he says. The grip of her hand, soft and sweet and cool on his overheated skin—it’s going to make him lose it before they’ve even started. “Just saying that much has basically ensured I’ll never need my ego stroked again.”

“Looks like you need something else stroked though,” she quips, and he grins. His laugh turns into a choked-off groan when she flips around, settling onto all fours as she fits the head of his cock into her mouth.

Ben lets out a groan that barely seems like it comes from him. It feels more like it was torn out, ripped from his chest, because if he thought the feeling of her coming on his hand was going to ruin him, if he thought eating her pussy was going to ruin him—

Her mouth is so _warm_ , wet and welcoming, and the way her tongue swirls around the tip, the way her hand pumps the length of his shaft when she can’t quite take any more of him into her mouth—it’s not _going to_ destroy him.

It already has.

“Stop,” he manages to gasp out, tugging her up by her shoulders to pull her away. “Rey, you have to stop.”

She looks up at him, her jaw still slack, her eyes wide and nervous, as if worried she’s done something wrong. “What?”

Ben looks at her. Drinks her in. He watches his hand as it moves to her hair, the way it’s fallen into further disarray, knotted up and tangled. Gently, he tugs it loose, sliding the tie onto his wrist so it won’t get lost in the bedsheets, and threads his fingers into the soft, chestnut locks.

He kisses her there, dropping a knee onto the bed as he lowers her back down onto the duvet.

“Slow down,” he murmurs into her mouth. “Or this’ll be over before it even starts.”

He feels her nod more than he sees it. He draws his fingers down her back, letting them linger at this spot on her shoulder blade that makes her arms erupt in goosebumps.

He still has a half empty box of condoms from the last time he dated anybody, well over a year ago by now. He reaches into his nightstand, fumbling for one of the foil packets, while Rey lays back, her legs spread open like the pages of a book. Even in the low light of his bedroom, he can see how wet she still is between her legs, how sweat shines in the space between her breasts.

Her chest heaves, the pads of her bra still haphazardly tugged down. He presses his fingers to her back, gently arching it before he undoes the clasp and pulls it away completely.

He can’t remember it, the last time he had a woman in his bed. He knows it pales in comparison to this.

When the condom is on, when he’s dropped both knees onto the mattress and lined himself up to slide inside, Rey tenses, her fists gripping the rumpled sheets.

Ben pauses, watching her face screw up in what could be concentration or pain.

“Rey?”

“Just—” Her teeth bite down on her full lower lip, her eyes darting away from his and toward the other end of the bed. “I’m not—I don’t know if I’m used to the feeling yet, of—of having someone inside and it might—if I make a weird face or if it hurts, I don’t want you to—”

He makes a decision then. He knows it’s a stupid one as soon as he does it. He knows it’s only going to wreck him even more, only going to make it that much harder later, when she’s gone.

He lowers himself over her and kisses the rest of her sentence off her lips, mouthing the space under the jut of her jaw by her ear, where her damn strawberry earrings practically taunt him.

“Sweetheart,” he says, quiet enough that it’s almost lost in the low current of the air conditioning. “I promise, I won’t let it hurt.”

Her voice is just as muted. “Yeah?”

He nods, squeezing his eyes shut briefly as he adjust himself between her legs, slipping his hand up the outside of her thigh, opening her up wider as his cockhead nudges her entrance. “I’ll go slow. And if you want to stop, just tell me.” He pauses, pressing one last kiss to the curve between her neck and shoulder, grinning into her skin. “Just—just use your words.”

Rey laughs, the sound full and sweet, and she’s still giggling when he first presses inside.

She’s tight, too tight, even after coming again. He wishes, for a moment, that he’d done more to prep her, used two or three fingers instead of one when eating her out, but when he pulls back slightly and reaches to do just that, Rey stops him, her fingers digging into his back.

He can hear the way the words almost stick in her throat when she tells him, “Don’t you dare stop.”

Ben tamps down the shiver that threatens up his spine at her tone, easing further in. He can barely remember the last time he had sex, period; he definitely can’t remember the last time it was face-to-face. He wants to flip her around, push her onto her stomach and fuck her into the mattress, or turn her onto her side and push into her pretty little body from behind that way. Anything so he doesn’t have to watch her expression as he slips deeper and deeper inside: the way her mouth falls open at the sensation, the way her eyes stay round and dark and fixed on his. It’s too much. He could die like this and not even notice.

It’s a mistake. Every single part of this. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when this is over, how to make her want it again, how he’ll stop himself from wanting it all the fucking time now that he knows what it feels like. He still can’t stop himself from looking back at her anyway. Drowning in the look in her eyes, buried almost to the hilt in her hot, wet cunt. 

Every single rational thought flies straight out of his mind the minute he starts to move, pulling back and inching forward again, splitting her open, filling her and filling her and _filling_ her.

They moan, both of them, at the feeling of him sliding inside, a wet, warm grip wrapped around his cock like a glove. He can feel the way her slick heat welcomes him, every single inch. She’s a damn _dream_.

He might say that out loud; he can’t really tell. The longer it goes on, the more blurred the line is between what he’s thinking and what he’s saying. At one point, she tells him, “You feel so good, too,” and he realizes he must have said it out loud, how much he thought about this, how much better it is than he could have ever pictured. 

He hitches her knee higher up his side, changing the angle ever-so-slightly, and she gasps when he bottoms out inside her, her body giving more than before.

“Fuck,” she whimpers, “Ben, you feel like—I can feel all of you, I can feel _all_ of you.”

She curls her little hand around his neck, urging him on just a little bit faster, just a little bit harder.

“You like that?” His hand slips, bending her leg further, tugging it up higher, and she makes a strangled noise of pleasure, her hands reaching back to press against the headboard with the way he’s fucking her farther up the mattress. “You want more?”

“Yes,” she says, the sound almost a sob, “yes, Ben, I want—I want, I want, I want—”

“Tell me what you want, baby,” he groans, the snap of his hips erratic, faster and deeper and harder, “whatever it is, tell me. Fuck, that’s good, so sweet and wet, could you come again? On my cock? Want to feel you come all over me, dripping all over me—”

She shakes her head, her eyes squeezing shut as she pants out, “Not right now, I already did, I just—I just like how it feels.”

Ben isn’t too surprised. Disappointed, maybe, but not surprised that she might not be ready or capable of coming during sex just yet, considering her nerves, her relative lack of experience. He could probably push her further, change the angle and finger her clit again, get her to change her tune, but he feels like she might not react well if he tried that right now.

“Next time,” he says.

The words tumble out of him before he can bite them down. Ben almost freezes mid-thrust, almost stops completely, but Rey just—

Nods, frantic and quick. “Next time,” she says. “Just fuck me, please, fuck me.”

His hips jerk forward of their own volition at her voice, at the way her legs have wrapped around his waist, his mouth pressing to the soft skin of her neck, and it's only another moment before he’s coming, almost accidentally and harder than he has in ages, emptying himself inside her with a groan he muffles into her shoulder. His orgasm feels like it goes on forever, every shift of her body under his, every twitch of her hips drawing further pleasure out of him.

His cock throbs in the slick heat of her, and his head is spinning. When he pulls out after what could either be minutes or hours, he barely manages to keep himself from collapsing onto her, shifting over just enough to fall beside her on the bed.

Sweat dries on his chest in the cool air conditioned room. He can hear her beside him, the way she struggles to catch her breath.

Ben has no idea how long they lay there like that; somewhere in that time, he realizes he needs to get rid of the condom, so he does, tying it off and dropping it with the packet into the trash can by his bed. And then he lays back again and stares at the ceiling, his lungs aching like he's just run a marathon instead of had sex.

 _Next time. Next time. Next time_.

He opens his mouth without a single idea about what he could say to confirm she said what he thinks she said: _were you serious about fucking again_ seems slightly too crass even for the circumstances.

Before he can so much as gulp in a breath of air, though, she's sitting up, running a shaking hand through her fucked-up hair.

“So, um,” she says inelegantly. She holds his bedsheets in front of her chest, unsuitably modest, as if he wasn't literally inside of her less than ten minutes ago. “That was...fun.”

His voice sounds rough, hoarse and raw from sex. “Yeah,” he agrees distantly. “Fun.”

The adjective feels utterly insufficient when he repeats it. It feels stupid and wrong and it isn't what he wants to call it. Incandescent. Amazing. A religious fucking experience.

Rey gets up then, still wearing the sheet like a makeshift gown, and pads quietly to the door. Presumably to get dressed and leave, the way most of the women he brings here do. He doesn't feel particularly grateful for it though, like he ordinarily would. He feels a little like she's knocked the wind out of him.

Ben lays there for a long moment when she leaves the room. Finally, he manages to motivate himself enough to put back on his boxer briefs and a t-shirt from his dresser.

He's sitting back on the edge of the bed when Rey comes back in, fully clothed, tying a bow around the front of her dress.

“Do you know where my bra is?” she asks, her voice pitched higher than usual. “I couldn't find—oh. Thanks.”

She crosses back over to the bed, careful not to touch his hand when she lifts the scrap of lace from his fingers, her eyelashes brushing the tops of her cheeks.

“Rey, do you—” Ben stops, clearing his throat, at the expression of confusion that has overtaken her face. “You haven't eaten yet,” he finishes lamely. He shifts on the bed, uncomfortable. “I can—order some food for you. If you want.”

A rueful smile flashes over her face. She shakes her head. “You don't have to.” He's quiet, watching her, trying to figure out what the hell he can say, when she continues blandly, “I—I should be heading home anyway.”

“Yeah, okay. That's—makes sense.” He nods once firmly, as if convincing himself of how sensible this is. Which, it is. Sensible. He doesn't want her to stay the night, that doesn't—he doesn't want her to.

“Okay, well.” She smiles, horribly casual, as if they weren't just fucking. Like it's no big deal. Nothing.

Which it is, he reminds himself. Look at how very _nothing_ this is. Just how he wanted it.

“I'm sure we'll see each other around, right?” She forces another smile, waiting expectantly for his reply.

“Yeah,” he breathes, and jerks his head in the direction of the door. “You can just let yourself out, and if—you know, just text me or whatever.”

Jesus. _Or whatever_?

Rey, for her part, doesn't seem to notice anything remiss about what he says. She nods again, and points her thumb and forefinger at him in an awkward finger-gun. “See you, Solo.”

He gets his voice back a beat too late, calling after her when she's already walked out of his room, “Yeah, see you.”

Ben listens to the sound of the front door opening and closing. Listens to the soft whirr of the ceiling fan. The time on his bedside clock tells him it's not even 7 p.m., so he gets up reluctantly to go microwave dinner. Or fuck it, maybe he'll just order in anyway.

After he calls the Thai place around the corner, he emerges from his bedroom. The Fern, by the window, seems particularly judgmental as he walks over to his couch to wait for the food to be delivered.

He pauses by the kitchen instinctively, his eyes dropping to the space on the counter where she was sitting less than an hour ago. Everything looks just like it did before, the marble cutting board, the knife dripping with fruit juice, both halves of the dragonfruit still sitting on the counter. It looks like a model for a painted still life. Like something waiting to be made useful.

Ben eats half of the fruit with a clean spoon and throws the other half in the fridge to finish later.

When he looks down, he can see her hair tie still wrapped around his wrist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ What if you felt the way I felt about you? Oh no. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ai8i2QXnNU)


	24. swimmy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay im gonna tell you guys right now there’s going to be MORE MISCOMMUNICATION and there’s going to be MORE SELF DENIAL and there’s going to be MORE PINING. it’s just going to happen. i apologize for the angst in advance bc it is my FIRM BELIEF that every romantic comedy needs some third act angst
> 
> silvia made a wonderful moodboard for this fic! check it out [ here!!!!!! ](https://twitter.com/tilvia11/status/1259940822742634497?s=21)
> 
> come say hi to me on [ twitter ](https://twitter.com/janedazey)! i tweet dumb things and post previews of my writing :)

** 24\. swimmy **

_STOP THE PRESSES THIS IS URGENT_ is the first thing Ben wakes up to on Saturday morning. His phone, which he’d neglected to charge, vibrates discordantly on the coffee table, jolting him awake from where he’d fallen asleep on the couch. The television is still asking him, in a manner that seems to his half-asleep mind somewhat accusatory, _Are You Still Watching Better Call Saul?_

He drags himself into a sitting position, rubbing at his eyes with one hand while the other uses the remote to click _No_. His phone buzzes again on the table, reading, _Rey has NEVER seen the ocean!!!!_

He picks it up, partly just to stop it from making that horrible vibrating sound on the glass, and opens up the group chat. He’s hardly even processed the first two messages from Finn when Rey’s name flashes into view.

 _this is absolutely a lie_ , she says. _i am from england finn it’s quite literally an island_

Suddenly, Ben is wide awake.

 _Okay fine_ , Finn writes back. _STOP THE PRESSES Rey has NEVER been to the beach!!!!!_

_ffs finn yes i have!! stop lying to the group chat!! don’t make me come out to the living room [snorting nostrils face emoji] [skull emoji] [angry devil face emoji]_

_[gif of a stand up comedian Ben does not recognize saying “I will stomp you to death with my hooves”]_

Poe’s name pops up: _What beach did you go to?_

 _oak street beach in chicago_ , Rey writes.

Rose’s name finally pops up. _oh babe_ , she says, _that does not count as “the beach” :( that’s like........a sad little strip of sand by a lake_

 _Rose is right_ , Poe agrees. Already, the conversation is happening so fast Ben can barely keep up, let alone reply. So he doesn’t, content to watch it unfold as he blinks awake by inches. _A lake does not a beach make_

Finn texts instantaneously, _THANK YOU!!!_ , even as Rey messages the chat, _it’s a big lake!!_

 _MY POINT BEING_ , Finn goes on, _we need to do a beach day_

 _Like right now_ , he adds in another message. _Everyone pack your bags because it’s HAPPENING_

_Bring sunscreen. Cover up the goods. Or don’t ;)_

_ew poe gross_ , Rose says.

_This is Paige I took his phone ;))_

_even grosser,_ Rose insists, and then changes tack with, _anyway im absolutely down!!! beach day!!! does noon work for everybody??_

_Poe is down too he says! I’m gonna sit this one out though, but y’all have fun!_

_Rey and I are OBVIOUSLY going_ , Finn writes. _So we can teach her the wonders of the ocean :’)_

_finn again i have already seen the ocean_

Finally, for the longest time since it first shook him awake, his phone stops buzzing. Ben stares at it in his hand, at Rey’s name in tiny little letters, until the screen goes black. Ostensibly, Ben realizes, this invitation to go to the beach extends to him, too. He is part of this message group, after all, and he assumes that if the invite didn’t apply to him they would not have discussed terms within it.

That being said, Ben doesn’t usually...do things. Or go places. With people. And he doesn’t dislike the beach, he actually enjoys the peace and calm of it sometimes, especially at this time of year when it’s not so crowded. Then again, the water is going to be nothing short of freezing cold, so it’s not like they’d be able to swim. And then, naturally, there is the matter of Rey.

Rey, of his workplace. Rey, of his fantasies. Rey, of the sex he had last night. Which, yeah, was good. Good sex. Who the fuck is he kidding—fucking incredible sex, change-your-life-and-leave-all-worldly-possessions kind of sex. And here she is, in the same group chat as him, ostensibly kind of inviting him to go to the beach.

And after all, he was going to text her today anyway, at exactly 2:30 p.m., because it’s the time of day when people are less likely to be too busy to reply, at least in his experience. He has two drafts of the message in his notes on his phone. The first reads, _Hey, what are you up to this weekend?_ The second is embarrassingly long-winded but essentially boils down to _please come over to my apartment again I can make you chicken parmesan and I can buy you ice cream and we can have sex again please come over_.

She’d said next time, hadn’t she? He doesn’t think he imagined that, even if there’s probably plenty of psychological studies indicating people hear whatever the fuck they want to during sex. She’d seemed interested in seeing him again, in having a repeat performance. So maybe she wants him to go. Maybe she wants the chance to see him again, and he’d be stupid not to agree.

Or—

Maybe she _doesn’t_. Maybe she’s in her bedroom in her apartment god knows where, clutching her phone in her hands and praying he doesn’t respond. She’d left so quickly last night. Gotten right up and out of his bed, gotten dressed. Immediately shut down any stupid little notion he had in the back of his mind that maybe they’d do something like eat dinner together. Sure, she suggested that they might see each other again, conjugally-speaking, but that was while he was literally inside her.

What if she’s—done with him?

Something seizes painfully in his chest. He doesn’t linger on the thought for more than a few seconds before shoving it to the back of his mind.

Ben clicks his messages back open and pauses over the empty message box, thumb hovering over the keys as he debates what he should say in reply.

As he agonizes, his phone vibrates once more. 

_@ben_ , Rose writes, _wya motherfucker_

Ben stares down at the message, his mouth slightly ajar in surprise. Then, as he watches, Finn joins in.

_BEN_

_BENNNNNN_

_benji_ , Rose goes on, _come to the beach_. And then, another message, right after the first: _@ben pls respond it’s urgent_

 _BENJAMIN C SOLO_ , Poe writes, the gratuitous use of capitals the exact opposite of shocking, _YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT THE BEACH_

 _@Ben Solo_ , Finn adds, _wake tf up man_

From Poe: _BEN_

From Rose, three texts in quick succession: _ben_

_ben_

_ben_

And then, Rey’s name. Ben reads, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, and it’s embarrassing how straight his posture gets, how much his eyes widen, it’s fucking sickening how fast he reacts to the sight of the three letters of her name appearing right then. _ben_ , she writes, _are you gonna come to the beach or what, buddy_

He types so quickly that it takes him three tries to spell two simple words, to add on the proper punctuation at the end. He shouldn’t be so nervous, so excitable, but he doesn’t even care enough to question it.

_Which beach?_

When he gets there, late from typical Los Angeles traffic, the sun is already at the highest point in the sky, and the only person still sitting at the collection of beach towels is Poe.

It’s not a busy day, despite the fact that the weather is warm. There are small groups of people dotting the sand here and there: families sitting in the shade of wide-brimmed umbrellas, children playing at the edge of the water where the tide laps gently at their heels, teenagers playing volleyball halfway down the shore. 

The other three—Finn and Rose and Rey—are already splashing enthusiastically in the water, treading and diving under the waves as they roll into shore, and chattering loud enough that he can hear the cadence of their conversation even from where he sits down with his towel and backpack on the sand.

“You made it,” Poe says, grinning and holding his arms out wide, gesturing to their new domain. “Beach day!”

“I made it,” Ben replies, muted but amused. “Beach day.”

He doesn’t want to be too obvious and look at Rey too much as he sets up his space; he focuses instead on unfolding his towel, carefully weighing down the edges with piles of sand to keep it from wavering up with the wind. He lets himself glance at her only when he sits down. Just the once, he tells himself. As he does, she pauses suddenly and stands up straight in the water, looking in the direction of the shore. Ben watches, momentarily struck, and he is just starting to wonder at her abrupt cease in motion, what could have possibly caught her attention, when a rogue wave rushes up behind her, finding her unaware, and knocks her down into the water.

Ben jolts, dropping his water bottle halfway through tugging it out of his backpack. His hands reach reflexively to the sand to push himself up, but she reappears a moment later, dragging both hands down her face to wipe away the water and visibly gulping in air. She turns away from the shore again and ducks back into the water, deliberately this time. Before his heart rate even has time to slow down, she swims over to Finn and Rose, who are still whooping and hollering things Ben can’t quite make out.

“Ouch,” he hears Poe say, presumably a reaction to the wipeout they just witnessed. “Poor thing never saw it coming.”

“She’s okay,” Ben assures Poe distantly, even as he feels strangely like he’s trying more to convince himself, to stop himself from doing something stupid like rushing into the water, black t-shirt still on, and searching her body for damage. “They’ll keep an eye on her.”

“You’re right,” Poe agrees confidently. He lays back against his beach blanket—a _Little Mermaid_ towel presumably borrowed from Paige which Poe is using seemingly without shame—and pulls a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out from thin air to take a huge bite. “How are you doing, man,” he asks, his voice thick around the peanut butter in his mouth. “How's your break?”

“I mean, it's only been a day.”

Poe shrugs. “Well, yeah, but still.”

Memories of the night before flash through Ben’s brain: Rey underneath him, her sweet little sounds, the way she felt inside, how she seemed to radiate warmth. He shakes his head and puts on his sunglasses, careful not to glance over at the water. “It’s—it’s good. I’m good. How about you?”

Poe nods, excited, and somehow manages to finish off the rest of his sandwich in one enormous swallow. “We’re good,” he says. He uses the first person plural without reservation, the way mothers and fathers do. “Paige and I are trying to give each other time to go hang out with people away from the baby, so she's meeting up with some sorority sisters tonight and I'm on diaper duty.”

Ben grins despite himself. “Jesus. You did not just say ‘diaper duty.’”

Poe frowns, his brow furrowed behind his aviators. “Oh, god. I think I did.”

“What happened to you?”

The question is light, casually sarcastic, but Poe treats it seriously. “I don't know,” he says thoughtfully. “I feel like I'm turning into my dad. Gonna start yelling at teenagers who walk on my lawn. Fall asleep on the couch watching the _War and Peace_ miniseries.”

“It was inevitable you'd turn into Kes Dameron.”

“Like how you’ll inevitably become Han Solo?” Ben grins, and Poe shakes his head, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it fall between his fingers. “The old adage about people becoming their parents always prepared me for the possibility that I’d turn into my dad, but it doesn't make it any less unsettling.”

“But you're happy?” Ben hears himself say. It’s absurd, really, how important the answer suddenly is to him. How important it is that Poe tell him yes, he is happy, even though he’s married, even though he has a kid, he’s happy and things haven’t gone to hell, no one is leaving anyone else, and it’s all okay.

Poe smiles, and Ben feels the knot in his chest suddenly loosen. “Yeah, I am,” he says easily. “I'm happy. What about you?”

His eyebrows knit together. “What about me?”

“Are _you_ happy?”

Ben pauses, thinking this over. Years ago, he would lie and say yes when his mother asked him the same question, just to get her to stop calling him, to get her to back off and leave him alone. He knows now that whatever it was he felt then never even came close. Even as recently as last summer, he’s not sure he would have really known how to respond. Sometimes he thinks he’s spent too much time alone—as a child, as an adult—and whatever ability he had to feel things like happiness and joy and peace and—and whatever else has been warped beyond recognition. Twisted, until it became unusable.

So he just shrugs. “Mostly, I think.”

Poe looks at him, still that thoughtful expression in his dark eyes. “You seem different,” he says slowly. When Ben only stares, Poe huffs out a short bark of laughter and waves his hand. “I don't know. Ignore me.”

“No, what do you mean?”

“You seem...more open, you know? I feel like even just a few months ago you never would've agreed to come to something like this.”

Ben’s eyes slide to the water. The sun beats down on the back of his neck, on his black hair. It warms him, the sand under his feet. “Maybe.”

“Does it have anything to do with...?” Ben turns as the question trails off, and Poe shifts his attention meaningfully over to where Rey is splashing around in the waves with abandon. She’s wearing a simple bathing suit, a sweet little two piece that shows off the bare curve of her waist. Even from here, he can see the wide grin on her face as she treads water and yells something to Rose.

“ _What_?”

“Did something happen you're not telling me about?”

Ben opens his mouth. Hesitates.

Not for long, but it's enough.

His friend’s eyes widen considerably, visible even behind his shades. “Did you two—” he starts, and then laughs, incredulous. “You did, didn’t you?”

Ben can feel his face heating in a way that has nothing to do with the sunny weather. “Did _what_?”

“Hey!”

Both men jump, caught off guard by the interruption. The sun silhouettes Rey as she approaches their collection of blankets, lighting the wet frizzy hairs around her head in a yellow glow.

She looks golden. Gorgeous. Like she’s the very reason poets invented the epithet _sun-kissed_. Drops of water cling to her skin, sluicing down her toned stomach, dripping off her tanned thighs, the gentle point of her chin. Her pink swimsuit clings to her curves in a way that he’s absolutely positive isn’t appropriate for a family-friendly beach. Or maybe it’s just him, since he can’t seem to stop staring at her tits, at the line of muscle between her abs, at the soft swell of her hips, a perfect handle for his fingers. She was underneath him less than a day ago, and he already wants her again.

He wants to get up and kiss her hello. He doesn’t. 

“Rey!” Ben bursts out, too loud and overexcited even to his own ears. He lowers his voice considerably at her startled expression, the tips of his ears burning. “Hi,” he says, considerably calmer this time.

She offers him a dimpled smile; if it seems slightly forced it’s not like he doesn’t understand the reason. Her attention quickly switches to Poe, who asks her, not unkindly, “Had enough?”

She nods, keeping her eyes fixed on the other man as she drops to her knees and lays flat on her stomach on one of the towels. Her arms lay flat at her sides, her neck turned toward them. “For now. Waves are strong today.” Her toes flex as she unbends her knees behind her, digging little holes in the sand with her feet. “God, my legs hurt. My poor arms.”

“We saw you fall down,” Ben murmurs. “Are you okay?”

“What? Yeah, I'm fine.” A divot appears between her eyebrows. She twists and holds a hand up above her eyes, shielding them from the bright sun as she looks at him. “Of course I'm okay.”

Ben can practically see the wheels in Poe’s brain whirring when he looks back and forth between them. He’s surprised there’s no _ding_ of understanding before Poe announces suddenly, “I'm gonna go take a dip. See you guys in a minute?”

“Yeah,” Ben says, waving as Poe smirks and clambers to his feet, sprinting to the ocean.

The ensuing silence after their buffer leaves borders on uncomfortable, but it isn’t quite. The sound of seagulls cawing and children shrieking fills the space between them well enough. Ben watches the tide rolling in, and then out, and then in again, rhythmic and unhurried.

Rey turns more fully onto her side, propping her head up on her elbow. Ben tries not to be obvious in the way his eyes slide up and down her body, but he has no idea if he manages to succeed.

“You should go in,” she says after a long moment, not quite meeting his eyes. She’s breathless, still gulping in air after so much physical exertion. “Water’s cold, but you get used to it.”

He nods, glancing at her from his periphery. “I will,” he says. And then, after a moment of hesitation, goes on, “Rey, I—”

“Nobody warned me about the salt,” she interrupts. The line of her throat works as she swallows, and she grins faintly. “The saltwater. It's—it burned my eyes and my nose. I swallowed some.”

“Oh, shit. Here.” He fishes for the water bottle in his backpack, glad that he filled it with fresh ice water before he left his apartment. “Drink some of this.”

She unscrews the cap, lifting it to her lips before pausing and eyeing him with exaggerated suspicion. “It's not poisoned is it?”

He smiles. “No.”

Rey drinks greedily, jerking herself into a sitting position so she can use two hands to tip the wide lip of the bottle into her mouth. A runaway drop spills out and onto the corner of her lips, sliding down her jaw. Ben wants to chase it with his tongue. Wants to tug her onto his lap and kiss the cold off her tongue. 

He stays where he is.

“Do you like it?” he asks once she’s had her fill and handed the bottle back to him. 

“Do I like what? This water bottle? I mean, a Hydro Flask is a solid enough status item if you're concerned about that, but it's nothing to write home about.”

“No, I mean—the beach. Swimming. Being here with—” He clears his throat. “With everyone.”

Her expression softens, just barely. Just enough to make his heartbeat thump louder. “Yeah, I do.”

They look at each other for a moment, heads turned. Her knees are bent towards his, feet tucked under her body like a mermaid.

Ben looks at her, and he looks at her, and there’s something trying to fight its way out of his throat but he doesn’t know what it is.

Rey breaks the moment first, her eyes lowering and hands coming up behind her head to take apart her ladder of three hair buns.

She tugs, lightly at first, then visibly harder when her hair refuses to cooperate.

“Fuck,” she mutters, and winces when she yanks again at the highest one and her bun stays stubbornly tied. “ _Ow_.”

His hand brushes her knee to get her attention, and she freezes. Rey’s eyes fall to his fingers. “Here,” he says quietly, “turn around. Let me.”

For a moment, he thinks she won’t—that she’ll push away, pull back, insist she doesn’t need any help from him.

But she doesn’t do any of that. She tucks her knees under her chin and turns away, ducking her head forward so he can thread his fingers into her hair.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, the sound of it almost lost under the dull roar of the waves. 

“No problem,” Ben says. The words nearly stick in his throat.

His fingers, thick as they are, are slow, cautious in unraveling her hair. He starts at the bottom bun, trying his best to keep from pulling too hard, pausing when her shoulders tense up with pain. “You shouldn't leave your hair up like this when you go in the water. Everything tangles.”

“Yeah.” Even though he can’t see her face, he can hear the self-deprecation in her voice. “I'm realizing that now.”

For a minute, that’s all they say. Ben tries not to get distracted by the freckled skin of her shoulders, focusing his attention on undoing the impossible knot of her hair. Her body is still cool from the water, but warming in the sun. Her arms pebble into goosebumps each time his arm brushes over her shoulder blade, over the strap of her bikini. Finally, he manages to work the lowest bun out of the elastic, and he moves onto the next one.

Ben barely even knows why he starts talking again. He hears himself as if he were speaking in a different room. “When I was a kid,” he begins slowly, still fixated on his task, “my mom used to wear her hair in these fancy braids. Lots of bobby pins, clips, little elastics. She'd keep them in this big box on her vanity in the bedroom. The mirror was this big, heavy, gold-framed thing that looked, you know, like a triptych—where you’d fold in the two sides to close it. She was always really careful about keeping me away from it, so my fingers wouldn't get caught in the edges.”

Her voice is very small. She says, “Yeah?”

He nods, even though she can’t see him. His throat feels tight. “When I was little, my dad used to help her take them out at night. She had long hair, down to her waist. Really thick too, but lighter than mine. Watching her put it up was like...I don't know. Magical. Her hands worked so quickly. Deft, like—a sailor with a rope knot.” The second bun comes loose, some strands of her hair snapping and breaking away as he tugs the elastic out. Rey is still, listening. “She used this sea salt spray, this big heavy bottle. It was gold, the liquid, and it smelled like the ocean.” He thinks of the sea salt bottle sitting on top of her dresser, how it would shine and shimmer when the sun came in through the window. “After my dad moved out, she had to take the braids down by herself.”

Rey is quiet for a long moment after he’s done speaking. His fingers work at the last bun, trying to loosen it while the rest of her hair curls and waves over her shoulders. “You didn't help her?” she says softly.

“No.” The third one finally comes out. All three elastics are on his wrist now. He peels them off and drops them onto the towel next to her. “There. Done.”

Rey murmurs a quiet thanks as she scoops up the hair ties and drops them in a little rucksack kept at the corner of her towel. Ben doesn’t know why he told her any of that, but before he can say anything, Rey laughs gently and catches his eye.

“I _have_ been to the ocean, you know,” she says, her voice soft. Smooth as sea glass. “My mother took me to the coast once, when I was little. Before she died. I don't remember where we went, just that there were these cliffs.” Her slender fingers tug through the damp locks of her hair, her elbows tucked into her chest. She doesn’t look right at him, but at the point of his shoulder. “And I was old enough to know to stay away from the edge, but I wasn't so old that I had any kind of sense, so I just—wandered off. I didn't think I was gone for long—I'd just seen these wildflowers growing a little up the hill, and I wanted to go pick them. But she—” Rey sighs, her hands stilling for a brief moment before moving again. “I guess she didn't see me go. Wasn't paying me any mind. After a few minutes, I heard her calling me. _Wailing_. And there she was when I got back, standing right at the edge of the cliffs, looking down at the rocks. She thought I'd fallen over the edge. Her voice was—she was so frightened. So afraid. When I came up and asked her what was wrong she gasped so loudly, held me so tight I couldn't even breathe, and she just kept telling me over and over again not to wander away like that. And that—it's the only time I remember her really caring enough to look where I'd gone.”

Her hands fall away from her head, dropping to the sand in front of her. She looks down at her own fingers, scratching little rows in the sand like she’s making a bed of flowers. Ben is quiet, looking at her. He wants her so much in that moment that it almost hurts. 

“I think she loved me, in her way,” she says after a while. “But I just—I spent so much time alone as a child. Just waiting for someone to see me. To want to be with me. I was just—” A rueful smile slants across her face like a ray of sunlight. “I always felt so alone.”

“You're not alone.” He says it before he can convince himself not to.

Rey meets his eyes. The edge of her smile lingers at the corner of her mouth. Right where he could press a kiss, if he wanted to. If she’d let him. “Neither are you,” she says quietly.

She smells like sea salt and heat and the golden sun pouring in through a window. He gets as far as, “Rey, I,” before she lets out a quiet huff of laughter and glances away again.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “I didn't mean to unload on you like that.”

“It's okay.” His head nods, and he doesn’t say it aloud, what he’d been already halfway to confessing: _I would look for you_.

There’s no reason to say it, so he doesn’t.

Under his continued attention, she shifts. “What are you staring at?”

“You’re—” He stops, shakes his head. “You're getting sunburned. On the back of your ears.” He pulls his sunscreen out of his bag, brought for when he needs to reapply. “Here.”

She takes the tube from him without brushing her fingers against his. “Thanks, that’s...” Laughter bubbles out of her as she reads the label. “ _100 plus SPF_ , Ben? Really?”

“I burn easily,” he defends, but flushes anyway as she continues to giggle.

“I feel distinctly unsurprised.”

“We all have our limitations.”

Rey squeezes out a healthy amount of sunscreen into her palm and rubs it onto her ears and the back of her neck. Ben watches, his fingers itching.

“I think it’s Charles,” she says once she’s finished and handed the sunscreen back to him. At his blank stare, she grins brightly. “Your middle name? Benjamin C. Solo?”

“Ah,” he says flatly. “No.”

“Christopher?”

“No.”

“Connor?”

“No.”

“It’s definitely Chad.”

“No.”

“Corpulent.”

He cracks a smile. “Stop guessing.”

“Never. Tell me.”

“Nope.”

She’s smiling, just at him, so dazzling in her contentment that it staggers him. He is staggered.

“I must know,” she laughs, her pink tongue poking out between her teeth, and her words spark a memory in him. His reply is automatic when he tells her, “Get used to disappointment.”

He realizes where he got the response from when her face lights up in joy. “Did you just quote _The Princess Bride_?”

He stammers, “I—I didn’t—”

She thumps him lightly on his upper arm, wiggling until she’s kneeling on the towel, her feet tucked under her body. “Benjamin Chesterfield Solo,” she says, sounding proud, “I never would have guessed.”

He points his finger sternly at her face, but it does absolutely nothing to diminish her delight. “You will tell no one.”

Rey holds up a hand with three fingers raised, an imitation of a Girl Scout pledge. “On my honor as a lady,” she says, faux-solemn even through her continued giggles, “your secret is safe with me.”

“I don’t believe you, and you're not a lady.”

“You're right,” she agrees happily, “I'm definitely telling everyone I meet about this. Who's your favorite character? Inigo Montoya? Fezzick?”

“I'm not entertaining this.”

“Yes, you are, hush. Who is it?” She stops abruptly, grabbing at his forearm as if to keep his body still for her sudden realization. “Oh, _I_ know.”

“You don't.”

She does.

“It's Westley,” she declares, triumph clear in her hazel eyes. “You wanted to be Westley. Dressed in black, back from the dead, able to take on Rodents of Unusual Size. _Life is pain, Highness—_ that is _so_ Benjamin Cornwallis Solo.”

 _Oh, god_. “Please, end this torture.”

She bounces up and down on her heels, her grasp on his arm tightening in her glee. “Admit that I'm right, and I will.”

“Fine,” he groans, and she squeals, now shaking his arm with the force of her delight. He can’t help but smile too, even as he affects a tone of annoyance when he says, “You're right.”

“Of course I am.” She clearly doesn’t have it in her to be a graceful winner. Rey beams at him, looking every bit like the ray of sunshine he’s begun to think of her as.

Then, just as fast, she seems to realize she’s still clinging to his arm, and she drops it like the touch of him burned her.

She adjusts her posture, folding her knees back up in front of her body, and tucks her hair behind her ears. “Are you going to go in the water?”

His skin is still warm from her touch. Ben flexes his hand open, then folds his fingers into a fist, like a flower blooming in reverse. “Soon,” he says.

“You should.” She jerks her head toward the edge of the shore, her smile softened on her delicate features, and stands up. The tops of her thighs are at level with his mouth; if he leaned forward, he could press his lips there. Curl his hands around the back of her thighs and feel the heat of her skin. Dust away the sand and salt. “Soon.”

Ben nods, offering a small smile as she jogs away from the towels and back to the ocean again. Eventually, he stands, tugging his shirt off by the back of his neck and kicking off his sandals so he can follow her into the water.

He mutters under his breath, low enough that he can deny it even to himself, “As you wish.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I'd take care of you. If you asked me to. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5kKenry2kU)


	25. a house for hermit crab

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YES the chapter count went up by one AGAIN. remember when i thought this fic would end after 17 chapters? i thought i did such a good job outlining
> 
> MORE BEAUTIFUL MOODBOARDS!!! this one made by elle! [ look at it now! ](https://twitter.com/qdamdriver/status/1262113147068055555) and then there's these two made by noni [ here ](https://twitter.com/lightrayder/status/1264362055223652359) :)
> 
> OBLIGATORY SELF-PROMOTION: follow me on [ twitter ](https://twitter.com/janedazey) :)

** 25\. a house for hermit crab**

Just like he predicted, the water is ice fucking cold. The salt stings his eyes when he finally caves to Poe and Finn’s peer pressure to go underwater (with Finn just shouting, “peer pressure! peer pressure!” until Ben relents), it feels like there are hundreds of pieces of seaweed sticking to his legs, and, despite the cold of the water, the sun beats down ruthlessly on him, indicating that he likely didn’t escape a burn, despite his careful planning. Based on his usual idea of what _fun_ is, Ben is having nothing close to it.

And yet—

There’s something about the smell of the saltwater. About the way the waves lap at his chest and rock him back and forth on his heels. There is something about the sun, even at its most merciless—how it slants through the white foam of the tide, how it heats his shoulders. There is Poe, who tries constantly to shove Ben’s head underwater with exactly zero successes (although Rey manages to take Poe down easily in the midst of his rant about Ben’s “brick-wallness,” whatever that is—it’s entirely possible Ben has never been more attracted to her), and there is Rose, who makes sure to ask questions and include him whenever she can in conversation, and there is Finn, who seems to warm to him more and more as the day goes on.

And there is Rey. How she attempts no fewer than six underwater handstands and gets progressively more frustrated every time a wave knocks her down, but never stops trying. The sweet flush on her cheeks when she asks if he can rub some sunscreen in the middle of her shoulder blades, where she can’t quite reach (and if his hand lingers on the small of her back, if his eyes drift to the shell of her ear, the soft indent of her hip—well, it’s not like anyone could blame him). When she is so utterly exhausted in the middle of the day that she falls dead asleep on her towel, under the shade of an umbrella Rose pulled out of her Mary Poppins beach bag and hoisted up over their territory.

She drools in her sleep, he finds out. Rey. Not that he watches her or anything. She drools and snuffles and mumbles nonsensical things. Once, while the others have returned to the water, she sits up straight, looks him dead in the eye, and announces, “Watch out, honey,” right before a stray volleyball hits him in the back of the head. She falls back asleep immediately after, snoring even before her cheek hits the sand. 

There’s something about the whole day, really. He can’t quite put his finger on it. Every time he tries, it seems to shift a little, blur further out of focus, but—

—there’s _something_ that just—

There is something.

Poe leaves first. That surprises Ben for multiple reasons, the most shocking of which is that he realizes he hasn’t checked the time for hours. When Poe announces he’s heading home while the group lounges on the blankets to dry off in the sun, Ben finally chances a look at his phone and realizes they’ve been there all afternoon and almost into the evening.

He hadn’t even noticed. For a second, he thinks his clock must be mistaken, but just glancing out at the shore, at the slow sink of the sun toward a pink and orange horizon, tells another story.

He just willingly spent a majority of his first day of spring break with other people. And he even sort of enjoyed himself.

Fucking weird.

So Poe says goodbye, and it’s already almost five o’clock, and Ben decides that he should beg off as well with his only friend leaving. He stands, about to make his own excuses and head home (his stomach twisting into a knot at the thought, at the fact that he hasn’t said any of what he’s wanted to say to Rey yet—though he has no idea what he’s even planning on saying to her, really). But then Rey suggests they all go back in the water to swim, and he... _goes_.

 _Insanely_.

And then, even after it grows too cold to keep swimming, and Finn has to nag Rey to return to the sand before her lips turn blue, Ben still doesn’t leave and go home. He sits on the beach with the other three and laughs at Rose’s terrible jokes and makes idle conversation about surfing with Finn and carefully avoids looking at Rey too often.

For another _hour_.

By the time they each start packing up their things and walking slowly back to the boardwalk, it is officially the longest amount of time Ben has spent with any of them outside of work. He thinks he doesn’t hate it.

The only thing, he thinks as he makes his way over to his car, Rey and Finn strolling ahead of him on their way to Finn’s, is that he still hasn’t really had a chance to talk to Rey about what happened, and how much he wants it to happen again, and does she want it to happen again, and could it happen again as soon as possible if she is amenable to the idea.

He jingles his keys between his thumb and index finger, a nervous flicker. He imagines, for a half-crazed moment, calling out to Rey to ask if she wants to get dinner just so long as they’re already out, but the second he pictures actually following through on the idea, he can practically feel his voice curl up and die in his throat.

Which— _good_ , he thinks, a little bitterly. He’s not trying to ask her out on a _date_.

As he gets closer to where they’ve stopped, he can hear snippets of their conversation, their voices rising and falling in a way that sounds almost like an argument. It isn’t until he passes by that he realizes what it is they’re fighting about.

“There’s absolutely no way,” Rey is saying sternly, her toned arms folded over her chest. “I can just take a Lyft.”

“Rey, I’m not going to let you spend thirty dollars on a ride share when I can just _drive_ you home—”

“And _I’m_ not letting you waste your time and gas on taking me all the way back to the flat when you’re just going to turn right around and go to Rose’s—”

“I’ve done it before—”

“And it was as pointless then as it is now. Finn, I will be absolutely _fine_ —”

“I can drive you.”

Rey and Finn stop instantly. It takes Ben a full breath to realize it’s because he’s the one that just spoke.

For a moment, his brain riots. Factions are swiftly drawn. _Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut_ wars with _be chill prove how cool and normal you can be_ wars with _this is your chance to have sex with her again_ wars with _Rey Rey Rey Rey Rey_.

Right up until the woman in question meets his eyes and smiles. Then, all brain function ceases, abrupt as if it had never existed.

“That would be great, Ben.” Her smile grows, just slightly. Just enough to stop his heart in his chest. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, no problem,” he breathes.

Her hair is tangled and loose, stray drops of water dripping all over his leather seat from the second she gets into his car. Every time she shifts—which is often, since she can never seem to get comfortable no matter how many different ways she contorts her body—she gets more and more sand on the floor; at a certain point, he starts wondering if she’s stockpiled it somewhere specifically to dirty his car with. She smells like seaweed and the Sprite and cold pizza she had for lunch. She’s wearing an XXL UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs t-shirt as a coverup, see-through jellies, like the kind children wore in the nineties, and absolutely nothing in the way of pants.

Ben can’t stop looking at her.

When he finally starts driving, after a brief discussion about the best way to get to her apartment, he’s surprised he doesn’t crash the car from how often his eyes are drawn to the passenger seat.

Because she is just so—she is so very—

He can’t even conjure up the right adjective.

She keeps up a steady stream of chatter as he drives, her voice sounding even more melodious than usual compared to the stiff robotic directions of the GPS, but it doesn’t seem quite like the nervous ramblings of the night before. Similar, but not quite the same.

She thanks him profusely for giving her a lift. Comments pleasantly about each song that plays on the radio—she can’t believe he pays for a Sirius XM subscription—and toys with the scroll to change the channels at every single red light. Muses about how familiar she is with different landmarks as they pass them—oh, she’s been to that taco truck before, she’s been meaning to go to that bar. Sings along to a song that he has never heard before in his life and manages to make it sound so lovely that he actually makes a mental note to look it up later.

It’s all perfectly friendly and chaste.

It drives him absolutely out of his mind.

By the time he pulls up in front of her building and her endless flow of idle commentary trails off into nothing before stopping altogether, his hands ache just from how tightly he was gripping the steering wheel.

After a drawn out moment of uncomfortable silence, he finally asks, “Should we maybe talk do you think?”

He speaks slightly too loudly for the confined space, so much so that when Rey talks at the same time as him, he can barely hear her.

“I’m sorry, what?” he says, at the same time she repeats, “Do you want to come up?”

“Yes,” he says quickly, almost before she finishes the question. He winces at his own obvious eagerness, but Rey does nothing but grin gently and curl her hands into fists around the bottom of her oversized t-shirt.

“Okay,” she says softly.

So up they go. To Rey’s apartment.

She’s on the second floor of what appears to be a rundown motel, but isn’t. According to her, it’s actually a pretty nice complex.

“Finn and I call it our Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn,” she declares somewhat grandly, in between colorful curses as she struggles to fit her key into the lock. The strap of her rucksack dangles from the crook of her elbow, and even now he can see sand scattering and falling all over the concrete walkway outside the door. “It’s not as sophisticated as your place,” she goes on, “but the location is great for the price.”

His lips twitch. “I bet.”

Rey grins up at him, and for a second he thinks she might sway closer—but then the key clicks, and the door swings open.

Almost immediately, his knees, bare under his shorts, are assaulted with sharp little claws.

“Baby,” Rey chastises, her voice stern as she bends at the waist to glare at the cat currently headbutting his legs. “You need to be nice.”

The cat, a fluffy monstrosity of orange and white, yowls again, louder and more petulant than before. Rey groans, but she still scoops the cat up into her arms, ignoring the way Baby sets about shoving his head right into Rey’s mouth.

“This is Baby Driver,” she says, the words slightly muffled around the fur. “He’s in constant need of attention. And before you ask, I got him _before_ the movie came out.”

Ben reaches his hand out, gently patting the cat on top of his head. The animal accepts his touch easily, pushing against his palm with the tip of his wet, pink nose. “Big Simon and Garfunkel fan, huh?”

“I have ears, don’t I?” she teases. “I am capable of perceiving sound? I have a heart as well as a soul?”

“Yeah,” Ben chuckles. “I like them, too.”

He closes his fingers around the top of cat’s head while Baby has his face pressed into the heel of his palm. The animal goes suddenly still.

“Hey—” Rey starts to protest.

“He likes it,” Ben assures her softly. Sure enough, Baby is purring softly under Ben’s hand, his eyes shut with satisfaction. A slow smile creeps over Rey’s face, and Ben grins. “When he gets tired of it, he’ll move away by himself.”

Rey nods. And they watch, quietly, as Baby snuffles and sighs and shimmies deeper into the cradle of his hand. “Did you ever have a pet?”

“My uncle did,” he says, remembering the fat ragdoll cat that used to lay out in the sun on Luke’s front porch, basking like an Egyptian god. “For a long time. I think R2 was twenty-five when he died.”

“Is that your Uncle Luke?”

Ben’s jaw clenches. “Yeah.”

He can feel her eyes on him. So _sympathetic_ , he’s sure. But when he looks up at her again, her face is perfectly even and calm. “You don’t have to talk about it,” she says measuredly. “If you don’t want to.”

He swallows around the sudden tightness in his throat. Baby finally squirms, and Ben lifts his hand away to let the cat blink his eyes slowly open. “I don’t.”

“Okay.” Rey bends back down, letting the cat drop with a thud back onto the floor. Baby trots away, his tail raised like a question mark, and leaps onto the green couch that dominates the front room.

That’s when Ben finally registers the rest of her living space.

The first thing he thinks is that her apartment is absolutely drowning with _stuff_. On shelves, on the windowsills, on every available flat surface are bits and baubles and plant life and children’s books and grownup books and records and what looks like three video gaming systems. As for the furniture, he can see in front of the heinous green couch is a coffee table made from raw wood, the kind bought and sawed at Home Depot; a circular yellow table in the kitchenette that is overflowing with papers and folders; two table chairs and two armchairs, none of which match, and each of which looks like it was found and fixed up by Rey. On the walls, there are pictures clearly drawn by children for both her and Finn, boasting the subjects as “the best first grade teechr!” and “so good at art!” He even spots Kyle’s letter from the beginning of the year, fastened to the drywall with a pushpin. He can see vintage anatomy papers repurposed as art, pressed flowers held between glass frames, a movie poster of _Baby Driver_ with Baby Driver the cat’s head cut from a photograph and taped over the main character’s face. Every available square inch spills over with things, with life.

His apartment is filled with leather furniture from West Elm. Sleekly modern art prints bought because they went with the color scheme, a glass coffee table he saw in a photograph of a former client’s mistress’s apartment, neat black household appliances that go together and function how they're supposed to and were bought brand new. The most life he’s taken home with him in recent memory is The Fern. And her.

Here, everything looks _found_ : fixed up and given a home, a sense of purpose.

It’s overwhelming. It’s all kitsch and cuteness. It’s all utterly charming.

It’s all Rey.

“Nice place,” he says eventually.

She grins as widely as if he’d just lavished her with praise.

“I need to take a shower,” she tells him. “Make yourself at home?” She says it like a question, like she almost expects him to refuse the request.

He nods absentmindedly, still glancing around, noticing new things with every sweep of his eyes—a pillow shaped like a chicken, a quilt made from old t-shirts, a framed cross-stitch that reads _YOU'LL SING A SONG AND I’LL SING A SONG AND WE’LL SING A SONG TOGETHER_.

“Or we could take one together,” he hears himself suggest. Rey pauses halfway across the room and turns to face him, her eyebrows lifted. He meets her eyes and shrugs, faux-nonchalant. “To conserve water.”

“Yeah,” she says slowly. “That could work.”

Her arms cross in front of her torso, fingers pinching the bottom of her ridiculous shirt. There is something in the way she holds her body, even before she peels the shirt over her head. She holds herself like a promise.

His heart pounds so hard against his ribs he wonders if it might bruise, like an overripe apple. Or something smaller, darker: a plum. With its skin about to split open and spill its insides out onto the floor.

He doesn't want that much from her, he thinks, and there's a note of desperation in it he's never felt before. _You don't want anything at all_.

He crosses the room and walks to the bathroom she just disappeared into. She stands beside the shower curtain patterned with raindrops, her body folded in half as she tugs her bikini bottoms off her hips. The shower is already going, the room filling up with steam. He shuts the door and walks further inside just as Rey straightens back up.

And it's not like he hasn't seen her naked before. He has already. Literally yesterday.

Still.

The sight of her slender body—long muscled legs, the small thatch of hair between her thighs, the rosy pink buds of her nipples, the soft plane of her abdomen, her teeth biting her plush lower lip, her eyes, wide and just a little bit nervous, just all of her, really—is still enough to make his stomach twist in excited anticipation and his cock stir in interest.

She hurriedly brushes her hair root to tip (which, he notes, is probably the reason for all her split ends; maybe he can teach her the proper way to comb out the tangles, or show her some nicer brushes) as she slips into the shower, her elbows bent above her head. 

He undresses quickly, eager to join her under the water, but before he can move closer he hears the distinctive scratch of claws against the wooden door and a plaintive meow of distress.

“Just let him in.” Ben glances back over, where Rey is peeking her head around the curtain. “He won't shut up unless he gets to come inside.”

“Noted,” Ben mutters, and cracks the door open enough to let Baby slip into the bathroom with a melodramatic meow. “He's a bad cat.”

“Just awful,” Rey agrees happily, affection obvious in her tone. “He's a horrible, whiny, needy little beastie.”

The cat leaps and settles onto the back of the toilet, where he has the perfect vantage to see Rey around the curtain without getting wet. “But you love him anyway,” Ben says, his voice sounding slightly strange to him, like it's really someone else saying it.

“Yeah,” she says, something softened slightly in her features as she looks at Baby. Ben's heartbeat picks up speed, thumping inside the cage of his ribs so loudly he's surprised it doesn't drown out everything else. She glances back up at Ben, her eyes lighting up. “Are you coming in or what?”

He can't keep his hands to himself, but Rey doesn't seem to mind. She lets him hold her from behind and grope clumsily at her tits, her ass. His fingers pinch and roll her nipples while she whimpers and wriggles herself against his cock. He doesn't bend her over, hold her hands against the tiles of the shower, and enter her from behind. He could, if she asked him to, but she doesn’t. He contents himself to feel her body. Feel her when she shivers as he slips his fingers between her legs and gives her something to fuck herself against. She writhes into him, her body slippery with soap, and every single time she lets out another sound, another breathy little whine, it goes straight to his cock, and he wants her. He wants her. He keeps her up against him with an arm wrapped around her middle, and she keeps one hand on his forearm, nails digging in, and the other she presses to the wall of the shower, trying to stay upright against the onslaught. She comes sweetly on his hand, her whole body tensing and fluttering, her cunt clenching hard around his two fingers, holding him there like a vice.

“Thanks, man,” she says afterwards, in the cadence of a joke. And then she turns around and curls her hand around his hard on. Drops to her knees and takes him in her mouth. Grips his cock tightly with her hand, lets her throat open up enough that he can feel the head of his cock nudging the back of it with every other thrust.

His mouth feels disconnected from the rest of him. His blood roaring in his ears almost completely blocks out the things he says, the horrible, need-filled groans of _fuck, yes_ and _that's right, sweetheart_ and _god, you're a fucking revelation_.

His hand tangles in her hair, tilts up her chin so he can look at her eyes, and oh, she's going to _ruin_ him. She already has. He already knew that yesterday, so he doesn't know why he did this, why he's here, he doesn't want anything at all, he reminds himself, he doesn't need anything and he doesn't want anything so he doesn't need this, he doesn't, he doesn't, _fuck, just like that, baby_ ; her fingernails dig deeper into the back of his thighs and he can feel her moaning around his cock, there's something wrong with him and he doesn't know what it is, there's something, there's _something_ , and _god damn it, you feel so good, look so pretty with my cock in your mouth, pretty girl_ ; she's sitting back on her heels with her thighs open and drool is dripping from the bottom of her chin, so he holds tighter to the back of her head and fucks her mouth, he can hear her squealing and moaning something that sounds like his name, his head tips back, and she's so warm and so beautiful and she’s there on her knees in front of him, _just_ for him, and he doesn't need anything, doesn’t need anything but this, and then he's shaking and groaning and spilling himself down the back of her throat.

  
She puts on a sundress after. White eyelet hem, thin straps that slide off her shoulders. She doesn’t wear a bra with it, and she keeps her hair loose so it can air dry. The water dripping off the ends of her hair dampens the front of her dress, so he can see the barest outline of her nipples under the fabric. She looks so hot he almost wonders aloud why she ever let him fuck her. Instead, Ben puts back on the spare t-shirt and shorts he kept in his backpack, and then he stands in the living room, entirely unsure of what to do with himself while she ties up her still dripping hair in a ponytail.

He should go, he thinks. He should wave goodbye and walk out of the door and text her the next time he wants to have sex (tomorrow, it’ll be tomorrow, or maybe in the middle of the night tonight, or maybe right now). He should leave.

He’s still standing there, his body tensed up like he’s just about to walk away, when Rey passes him on the way to the fridge and tosses back over her shoulder, “I was just gonna eat some leftover Chinese. Do you want any?”

Ben blinks. He clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says, sounding slightly hoarse. “Why not?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Oh, you’re like a lover. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0vQsfcm38c)


	26. bear wants more

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, everyone. i hope you are safe and well. please take care of yourselves. please continue to support and fight for each other. i love you all.

** 26\. bear wants more**

He doesn’t stay the night. She doesn’t make any mention of it, so he doesn’t ask.

After Rey heats up the leftover Chinese and they eat next to each other at the coffee table (the kitchen table is for paperwork and bills, she tells him, and other such detestable things), they have sex again.

It’s because he’s about to leave. Because Rey stands up to give him a friendly hug before he goes, and because, instead of reciprocating the gesture like he should, he kisses her instead. The way he's wanted to all fucking day, the way he’s thought about kissing her since the second she left his apartment the night before.

Rey kisses him back immediately. Wraps her arms around his neck when he lifts her up to straddle him on the couch.

The groan he lets out when he finds her pussy bare under her sundress is purely accidental, loud and drawn out.

“You god damn tease,” he hisses, watching with a heavy-lidded gaze when she squirms at the first press of his thumb to her clit. She’s already so wet, already arching her back and writhing on his lap. Ben just lived through the best blowjob of his stupid life, but even before she whimpers out, “Ben, please,” he’s so hard it’s almost dizzying.

His other hand makes quick work of the top of her dress; he tugs down the fabric in front until her tits are bared to him, pink nipples taut and hardened.

“Ben,” she whines again, breath hitching when he swirls his tongue around the soft peaks, tracing between her tits until both are flushed and wet with spit. Her fingers tighten in his hair to the point of pain, but he doesn’t even mind, his world narrowed down to this one thing. Just her. Just Rey. “Ben, please.”

“Please what?” His words are garbled, muffled around the soft, round breasts in his mouth. When she just whimpers again, he drags the hand searching between her legs to flip the hem of her dress up and out of the way. The noise she makes when he smacks her ass is something that he already knows will never, ever get out of his mind. “Ask nicely, sweetheart.”

“Please,” she gasps, “please, please fuck me, make me come, I want, I want—”

Everything blurs after that. He hears himself call her _good girl_ before flipping her onto the cushion and rolling her onto her stomach. Rey keens when he says it, so, so loudly, so he says it again, and again: _good girl_ as he slips deep inside her, _good girl_ when she rubs her clit with the pads of her slender fingers, _good girl_ when she fucks back against him, impaling herself with his cock.

He finishes first, unable to hold back, completely unraveled at the sight of her hair roped around his fist, at the feeling of her cunt, soft and warm and perfect. He only takes the time to peel off the condom before he flips her back around and buries his face between her legs.

Then: her thighs are twitching and her hands are scrambling down the couch cushions and her voice is scraping hoarse and raw as she babbles over and over, _fuck, Ben, oh god, oh god, ’m gonna come, you’re gonna make me come, fuck, fuck, fuck—_ and her words pitch into a squeal and her hips rock against his face as she shakes and comes in his mouth.

Afterwards, he composes himself while she goes to the bathroom. He gets dressed. Holds half-heartedly onto the strap of his backpack.

When she comes back, her dress righted once again, he says, as if in a daze, “I guess I should head home.”

And she nods her head. Agrees evenly, “I guess so.”

So he gets up to leave.

There is, though, a long, terrible moment by her door. When he just stands and shakes his car keys in his hand and shifts on his feet. Like he’s waiting to see if she’s going to say anything else to him. Across the room, she just waves and offers him a smile that seems slightly too strained.

She doesn’t walk him to the door, just like he didn’t for her. If he were a more spiritual person, he’d call it karma.

As it is: it just kind of makes him want to sleep for fifteen hours straight.

So he does, the second he gets home. He washes his face and brushes his teeth and goes to sleep at 8 p.m. Like a child.

On his nightstand, his phone lays still, quiet and dark.

It happens again.

On Monday, he texts her a link to a Futurism exhibition at the LACMA. It takes her three hours to write him back, and then Ben doesn’t text her anything back, primarily because he has no idea what to say in response to _thanks, i’ll have to check it out! [blushing face emoji]_

On Tuesday, she messages him to say she realized he left one of his spare t-shirts in her apartment.

 _You can bring it by my place,_ he says. _If you want._

Twenty minutes after she answers in the affirmative, she is standing in front of the door to his apartment. Her hair is down, gently wavy, and her eyes are soft. When she holds his t-shirt out to him he takes the fabric with one hand and her wrist with the other, and he tugs her into the apartment along with the shirt. 

On Wednesday, he realizes she left her daisy-shaped earrings on his coffee table after she took them out. He takes a picture of them and sends it to her. He asks: _How do you want me to get these back to you?_

 _you can bring them to my flat right now if you like,_ she says in reply.

He fucks her on the yellow kitchen table this time, on top of a stack of mail addressed to _CURRENT RESIDENT_ from Chase Bank. Her hair is down, and when she lays back against the laminate, locks of it spread around her head like a halo.

After, she tells him that he’s welcome to stay for dinner, but that later Finn and Rose will be coming by to see a movie with her, so it might be better for him to head home. If he wants.

On his way back to his apartment, he realizes he hasn’t yet seen her room. Doesn’t know the color of her sheets. If she has curtains. What book she keeps on her nightstand. She hasn’t taken him into her bedroom, so he hasn’t asked to go. They’ve fucked on four separate occasions, and he doesn’t even know what her bed looks like.

And it’s fine.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

It’s exactly what he wanted. Exactly how he wanted it. From the beginning, he knows, this is what he told himself he wanted. 

So it’s fine.

The week of spring break has always felt strange to him, even more so than the two weeks he gets off for winter break and the week at Thanksgiving, both of those breaks justified by being centered around major holidays. It's stranger, even, than the two months of summer vacation, since Ben can usually manage to fill his time then with routine: catching up on reading, learning some new skill his father thinks a man should know, exercising and cooking and mowing his parents' lawn. But when he wasn't at the school, when he was still working as a lawyer, Ben became accustomed to never-ending days that turned into never-ending weeks that turned into months, years of his life. When he worked for Snoke, the idea of taking a week off in the middle of March was laughable at best, grounds for borderline abusive punishment at worst.

Having one week off in the middle of spring is an entirely different animal: the unusual and open-ended feeling he gets in the mornings, looking at the prospect of an empty schedule, the days growing longer and longer—it's alien enough by itself. Adding Rey into it—adding whatever they're doing with each other, _to_ each other—

Even only halfway through the break, it feels like a fever dream. It doesn't feel anything like real life.

On Thursday, he goes to an Angels game with his dad and Chewie.

It's slow for most of it, as most baseball games are. That, though, doesn't help with the curl of anxiety that's made a home in the pit of his stomach since the moment he left Rey's apartment the previous night, after declining to eat more of her leftovers. There's too much space, in the entertainment and in the conversation, to let his mind wander in directions he'd rather not have it go. He checks his phone so often during the first hour of the game that Han asks him if he's expecting a call.

“What? No,” Ben says, furrowing his brow behind his sunglasses. Chewie is up getting beers for the three of them, and Ben is alone with his father and a phone that refuses to buzz. “I'm not expecting anything.”

“Doesn't seem like it.” Han shovels peanuts into his mouth by the handful as he speaks, entirely uncouth and entirely uncaring about the etiquette of it. _It's a baseball game_ , he's said when confronted on the matter in the past. “Seems like you've got ants in your pants.”

Ben rolls his eyes. “God, Dad, I'm not seven.”

“Adults can have ants in their pants,” Han says simply. He eats another too large portion of peanuts; his voice is muffled around the food when he says, “You should just call her.”

 _“Her_?” Ben sputters. “Who's _her_?”

It's his father's turn to roll his eyes. “Ben.” His voice is labored, a perfect impression of the put-upon father of a wayward child. “I wasn't born yesterday.”

Ben scoffs. “I knew that already, old man.”

“So...” Han's voice trails off meaningfully.

“So?”

“So I know it's about a woman.”

“Why, exactly, do you think it's about a woman?”

“Well, for starters, that's the third time you've checked your phone just since we've been talking about this.”

The screen is swiftly covered with Ben's hand. He forces himself to keep his gaze on his father, even as half his attention remains keenly fixated on detecting any vibrations from his cell. “That can't be accurate.”

“It is. You're waiting for a call.”

“People don't call anymore.”

“A text message then—”

He snorts, “— _text message—_ ”

“—and, besides that, I know it's about a woman because when Chewie asked if you were seeing anybody you practically leaped out of your skin.”

Ben gapes, offended. “I did _not_.”

“You did,” Han replies seriously. “It was very funny to watch.”

“Glad you're having such a great time at my expense.”

“Ben,” Han says, almost gently, “ _relax_. You're not the first person in the world to get jittery at the beginning of a relationship.”

“I'm not—” Ben breathes out hard through his nose, resisting the urge to drag his hand down his face. He pauses halfway through his outright denial and changes tack. “It's not a relationship. I've told you this before, you know—you know I don't want that.”

His father considers this for a long moment. He leans back in his seat, stretching his arms overhead, drawing out the drama of the moment the way he always does. _Irritating_. “Well, _I_ know that,” he says eventually, even and slow. “But do _you_?”

For a moment, Ben is furiously, stubbornly quiet. Han, like usual, takes it as his cue to continue his thought.

“You know,” he says, “it's not a bad thing to change your mind if you want to change your mind.”

“Who says I want to change my mind?”

“No one said that.” Han holds his hands out in front of his chest like Ben is a wild dog with a broken leg and severe trust issues. “I'm just letting you know, in case you didn't already, that the option is always available to you.”

“I know that,” Ben snaps.

His father raises his eyebrows. “Do you?”

“You know,” he replies testily, “saying _do you_ in response to anything I say isn't nearly as wise as you seem to think it is.”

“Maybe not,” Han concedes. “But I have learned a few things in my life.”

Ben rolls his eyes again, and feels so much like a teenager it’s almost unbearable. “Yes, so I’ve heard—”

“Son, would you let me finish?” When Ben only clenches his jaw, his father cracks his neck and goes on. “The main thing I’ve found,” he says firmly, “is that people aren’t mind readers. Especially when it comes to these things.”

“ _What_ things?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Han says, furrowing his brow. “Don’t play dumb, kid, it’s not a good look.”

Ben lowers his eyes, only slightly chastened. Ahead of them, the Angels pitcher winds up and releases the ball, straight into the catcher’s glove. “What exactly are you trying to tell me, Dad?”

“I’m telling you," his father says, suddenly serious, "that no one will know what you want unless you _tell them what you want_.”

For a moment, neither of them says a word. Around them, the air smells like sweat and dirt and sand and hotdogs. It is, to put it bluntly, the least likely place Ben would ever think of to be open with his dad.

So he isn't.

“Great advice,” he tosses out, all false levity and scorn. “Did you read that on the side of a shampoo bottle?”

That, he supposes, will be the end of it. He's mildly surprised when it isn't, when Han just shakes his head and lets out a little huff that sounds like disbelief. “Dismiss me all you want,” he says. “Eventually, you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that I’m right.”

“Yeah, well.” Ben shrugs, a sharp jerk of his shoulders to his ears. “I won’t.”

He makes the mistake, then, of risking a glance at his father. When Han catches Ben's eye, he holds his gaze, solemn and quiet, until Ben almost starts to squirm, discomfited. “Then you’re going to fuck it up,” Han goes on, once he's sure he has his son's undivided attention. “And when you do—”

“Let me guess,” Ben interrupts, still affecting an air of casual indifference, “I can’t come crying to you.”

Han only shakes his head again. “No, you can. You just can’t act surprised when I say _I told you so_.”

Ben's jaw tenses. For a heartbeat, he considers spilling his guts, the way he would, sometimes, as a child: the times when he'd wake from a bad dream in the dark of his bedroom. The feeling he had when he'd traverse the dark of the hallway, the flight of stairs—his stomach twisting itself into complicated little knots, his teeth grinding. His hand poised over their door, and how it felt to hear his mother and father's whispered arguments on the other side. On occasion, he could hear his own name floating between their mouths, sounding so much like an accusation.

He remembers the first time he woke up from a nightmare and chose not to go to their bedroom. He had laid underneath his sheets, tucked in so tight he could hardly even move. Tried to steady his breath. And the fact that, after that, he never bothered them about something so meaningless again.

“Just—” Ben hesitates, the word hanging in the air, seeming heavier and heavier until he continues, low and quiet, “Don’t tell Mom, okay? I don’t want the Inquisition.”

There's a brief, weighted pause before Han finally nods. He brushes a finger against his nose and folds his arms over his chest. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t. But it’s cute that you think she’s not finding out about it anyway.”

At that, Ben gives in and hangs his head forward, rubbing his temple with the heel of his palm. “Shit,” he mutters darkly.

His father only laughs at his misery. “Language, Benjamin,” he says. “Language.”

On Friday, Ben calls Rey.

It takes him forty minutes to work up the nerve. The instant his thumb presses the little phone icon underneath her name, he almost throws his cell across his bedroom. But he doesn't. Instead, he holds it up to his ear and listens to the rhythmic ringing. For a few seconds, he wonders if she'll pick up at all—if she'll see his name flash across her screen (he wonders what he's saved under: _Ben Solo_ or just _Ben_ or _Work Ben_ or _Don't Answer This He's Just Going to Beg You For Sex_ ) and make the active decision to ignore his call. He thinks, half-heartedly, that it might be worse if she picks up than if she doesn't; after all, it's not like he has any idea what he's going to say. But that's just wishful thinking, he knows.

If she doesn't pick up, he will be—he will feel—

“Ben?”

His entire posture changes in an instant. Back straightened, shoulders squared, lungs filled with a steadying breath.

“Hey.” He manages, against all odds, to sound somewhat relaxed.

“Hi.” He imagines, briefly, that he can hear the smile in her voice. “Um. You called me.”

“I did.” A pause, then, that stretches on for just a moment too long. “Was that a question or...?”

“No!” She clears her throat and lowers her voice, as if realizing how loud she spoke through the speaker. “No, I’m just a little surprised.” She laughs, sweet and joyful; god, he just...he loves her laugh. “No one calls anyone anymore, it’s all texting.”

“But I do. Call, I mean.” He shifts his weight on the bed, curling his fingers over the edge of his mattress. “Is that bad?”

“No, it’s—it’s nice, actually.”

He lets out his breath in a rush and nods, even though she can't see him. “Oh, good. That’s good to know.”

“You know, I was just thinking about you.”

He thinks his heart might be beating in his throat. “Really?”

“Yeah. You sent me the link for the Futurism show? I went today.”

The flood of disappointment he feels is, he knows, absurd. It's not like he wanted her to go with him, he reminds himself—he didn't even ask her. “Oh?” he manages lightly.

“Yeah,” she says. “Rose and I did a girls day.”

“Oh, that sounds...fun.”

“It was. It was really—” He doesn't think he imagines it this time—hearing her smile through her words. “It was really thoughtful of you. To recommend it.” There's a moment of static, like she's adjusting the position of her phone. “So, um, is there—was there a particular reason you called?”

“Yeah, actually, I wanted—” For a truly horrific second, he wonders if he'll be able to say it at all. If he will, instead of getting out the simple yes or no question he called her to ask, he will instead make the thinnest of excuses, hang up the phone, and spend the rest of his night in silence, staring quietly at the television and not paying attention to a single thing.

And then, he gets out, “Do you want to come by my place tonight?”

“Oh!” The exclamation makes it seem, almost, like the question was the last thing she expected. How funny. “Did I—did I leave something else in your flat?”

His stomach sinks. “No. No, not at all, I just—I just wanted to see if you want to come over. I can—”

“Yes,” she cuts him off, thankfully before his sentence can devolve further. “I mean, yeah, I can definitely—I'm free so it's cool and I can definitely come by your place and what time?”

He blinks, lost in the breathless rush of her sentence. “What?”

“What time should I come over?”

“Oh. Now? If that works?”

Rey is quiet then. Long enough that he almost wonders if he should repeat himself. “Now works,” she murmurs eventually.

“Good. Good, that’s—” His eyes squeeze shut for a moment, and he ignores the leap of his pulse in his throat. “Great.”

“Okay,” she says quietly. “I’ll see you in a bit then, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says as coolly as he can. “See you.”

When he opens the door, Rey’s hand is still raised up, curled into a fist, halfway to knocking again.

She startles when she sees him. Almost stumbles forward into his chest, but catches herself at the last moment and drops her arm back at her side.

She's wearing shorts and an overlarge sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up, a picture of Pooh Bear stitched across the chest bisected by the strap of her purse. Her hair is half-up, her face bare, and she looks so perfect in the arch of his doorway he almost wants to take a photo of it.

He can hardly believe she actually showed up.

“Rey,” he says.

“I had a hell of a time parking,” she replies immediately, the words sounding somewhat like a prepared statement. “I may or may not have dinged a Tesla. I haven’t parallel parked anywhere in years, probably.”

There’s a flash of a smile on his face. It matches the one on hers. “Years?”

“Mhm,” she hums.

“I’m surprised your car is capable of such a thing,” he teases.

“Are you?”

“Deeply.”

“Blown away?”

“Flabbergasted, even.”

She giggles, her nose scrunching up in an expression of pure joy, and Ben—

Ben melts. Like a crayon left out in the sun: a puddle of color, reshaped into something new.

He realizes he’s been looking at her for just a moment too long when she shifts on her feet and adjusts the grip she has on her purse.

“Am I allowed to come in?” she asks, sounding nervous. As if there were a real possibility he might say no.

As if he would ever.

“Yeah,” he replies, “yeah, of course,” and steps back to let her walk through the door.

She does, her tread light on the hardwood. She glances around, taking things in like it's the first time she's been here.

“Nice place you got,” she jokes, affecting a flattened, vaguely Midwestern accent, and Ben winces.

“God, you're terrible at that.”

She gasps, mock offended. “Rude.”

“You need to stick to what you're good at, Miss America.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Which is?”

 _Everything_. “Parallel parking.”

A burst of laughter bubbles out of her once again. Ben grins, and then he's kicked the door shut and crossed into his apartment, and he's kissing her, her lips warm under his mouth, her body molded against his chest. He can feel it against his skin, when her lips twitch into a smile. He can feel her, small and sweet and soft—how she presses herself further into his hands.

He tells himself: this isn't a big deal. This doesn't have to mean anything more than what it is.

But it just feels like it did so many months ago, when he told himself the same thing. Another quiet concession in a series of quiet concessions.

Ben keeps his eyes closed and kisses her until he isn't thinking about anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I had to interrupt and stop this conversation. Your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation. I'd like to talk when I can show you my affection. Oh, I can't control myself! ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emy5mA8Ixtc)


	27. tuesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ANOTHER CHAPTER but it WILL end at 31 SO HELP ME GOD.
> 
> also: YES i know the renaissance faire doesn't happen until april in pasadena I KNOW but just imagine that it doesn't. thank u 4 ur time.
> 
> go follow me on [twitter ](https://twitter.com/janedazey)  
> what r u waiting for ;)

** 27\. tuesday**

The weekend goes by too quickly for him.

As a child, Ben never fully grasped the concept of time flying. For him, it didn't. Time dragged. He used to spend hours by himself, waiting for the minutes to pass: working quietly in the corner of his mother's classroom while she did everything for everyone but him, sitting on the front porch while his father tinkered with the Falcon for ages, playing and working alone in his bedroom, in his backyard.

But—

The weekend flies past him. Slips through his fingers like water: something he can't hold onto.

Friday night is spent in bed. Spent memorizing every inch of her. Every curve, every little place he can reach with his fingers, with his tongue. Spent slotted between her legs, warm and buried inside her. Rey leaves after midnight, citing early morning brunch plans with Rose and Jannah. But then she's over the next night, and then the next.

It becomes an odd microcosm of a routine: they have sex; he makes dinner; she goes home. It's strange. It's fantastic. It’s confusing as hell.

Somehow, he feels more at peace than he ever has. And, conversely, more anxious than he would have ever thought possible. It feels, at times, like there is a sinkhole somewhere in the center of him, like something he could tumble into at any moment. It goes away when she's there; it comes back with a vengeance every time she walks out of the door.

Then, school starts again.

After a week spent living in some parallel universe, a universe where Rey willingly spends time with him, and has sex with him, and eats his spaghetti with so much gusto he finds it both frightening and arousing, Ben goes back to his real life.

The sinkhole feeling in the pit of his stomach expands with every single day he doesn't see her. Every day he doesn't text her, unsure if that's within the realm of acceptable behavior. Unsure if whatever strange little thing they had could survive the state change from Not Real Life to Real Life.

Monday passes. Tuesday. Wednesday.

On Thursday, they run into each other in the halls of the lower school, as Ben is walking Kyle back to his classroom.

“Hi, Mr. Solo,” she says brightly, and then stops in the middle of the hallway to look at them more fully. Her mouth opens, and she sucks in a breath of air like she might say more, before her eyes slide down to his right to look at the student standing with them. “Hi, Kyle.”

“Hi, Miss Jackson,” Kyle says, his face lighting up in joy.

“Are you excited for art class tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Kyle exclaims.

“Always,” Ben supplies quietly.

Rey glances up and meets his eye. She flushes. Looks back down to his charge.

“I'm glad to hear it,” she murmurs.

Later that night, he finally texts her. _Do you maybe want to come over tomorrow?_

 _can't,_ she tells him. Then, before his disappointment can flare fully into resignation, goes on, _i'm going to the ren faire this weekend. not gonna have the energy to do anything :(_

_but if you want_

_i can come by on tuesday?_

The sinkhole vanishes. Into thin air. As if it had never been there at all.

 _Tuesday works_ , he says.

Friday.

Saturday.

Sunday.

Monday.

It all blurs together.

Ben doesn't even care.

Tuesday is his new favorite day of the week.

(God, he needs some fucking _help_.)

“I know, I know,” she says, strolling past him into his apartment the moment he opens the door for her, “I look terrible.”

Objectively speaking, she's probably not wrong. As she spins around to face him, planting her hands squarely on her hips, Ben can see clearly the bags under her eyes, the stray hairs frizzing out of her bun from every direction, the sunburn on her forehead and the bridge of her nose, already peeling off.

But that's all speaking objectively. Which he is not.

“You look great,” Ben says, stupid and breathless.

She huffs out a laugh and rolls her eyes. “You don't have to lie, Ben,” she informs him loftily. “I feel like I want to sleep for fifty years, but at least I bought a corset.”

His swallow, he's sure, is audible. “A corset?”

A grin spreads over her face, stretching the sunburned freckles on her cheeks. “Shut up.”

“Do I at least get to see it?”

Rey toes off her orthopedic clogs where she stands by his kitchen counter and shakes her head sternly. “Only if you're good.”

It's three paces for him to reach her. He walks slowly, deliberately, like the slow stride of some carnivorous predator. Watching her hazel eyes as they widen, the beat of her pulse in her throat.

Her spine straightens when he reaches her; her pink lips part.

“I can be good.”

He watches her _shiver_ at the low timbre of his voice.

Her eyes flutter, and Ben imagines, briefly, pressing a kiss to the space just above the lid, under her eyebrow. It's an odd thought, and he pushes it out of his mind the moment she looks at him again.

“Show me then,” she says.

A challenge.

He has to convince her to ride his face.

She's shy about it at first.

That's a bad angle, she insists breathlessly, as he does his best to devour her throat while they sit on his couch. What if she crushes him to death? She watched a television show where that happened and now she thinks she might have post-traumatic stress disorder, not that she's making light of a serious mental health issue, of course, but she had nightmares for, like, a week. What if he suffocates in the name of eating her pussy? She would have to self-immolate from sheer embarrassment.

“That's literally impossible,” he explains, somewhat gently. “Because I'm bigger and stronger than you, and I'm not a fucking idiot who would drown in a puddle two inches deep.”

“That's what you think,” she says.

His eyebrows knit together. “Which part?”

“That you're bigger and stronger than me.”

He levels her with his most withering glare.

“I grant that you are bigger,” she admits after another moment. “But stronger? No way. I'm very strong.”

“Sure you are, sweetheart.”

“And scrappy,” she adds, as if he hadn't spoken. “As _fuck_.”

“Oh, of course.”

She gasps dramatically. “You don't believe me.”

“Not even slightly.”

“Want to fight me about it?”

“I'd rather fu—”

“If you beat me,” she says, her voice overlapping his crudeness, “I'll sit on your face. And if I beat you, you have to eat me out the normal way.”

“Perfect,” Ben says, “the usual bet—”

The last of his sentence is cut off when Rey tackles him.

She's right—she is scrappy.

She's also wrong—he's stronger.

Rey has the advantage of surprise at first. She manages to wrestle him down to the cushions, knocking the wind out of him when she throws the entire weight of her body on his chest in an effort to keep him contained.

But, as it is, it's the work of seconds to reverse their positions. He pins her down easily, his hands manacling her wrists, his knees keeping her thighs open and spread-eagled.

She struggles against him for a minute. He can feel the sincere effort behind her movements, sees her brow furrowed in feigned annoyance, but the beatific smile on her face betrays her anyway.

“Fine.” Her body goes slack under his. Her hands open in surrender, and she sighs, lifting her eyes to avoid meeting his. “You win.”

He nods, satisfied—and then, of course, the moment he lessens his grip on her, she shoves against him at full force, knocking him flat on his back, and straddles him again, making a show of holding his forearms down on either side of his head.

He lets her. Watches her pull panting gasps of air into her lungs, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

“Thanks.” He smirks. “Getting into position already.”

She bends close to him, her hair, now tugged loose, falling into his face. She snarls, a cute little growl in the back of her throat. “Shut up, Solo.”

“Make me.”

Ben tugs at the back of her thighs, guiding her to hover over his mouth. She follows his lead, bracketing his ears with her knees, and lowers herself tentatively over his face.

It only takes him a moment to peel the gusset of her panties to the side and lick through her folds. To shove the hem of her dress up and grope clumsily at her tits—pulling down the fabric of her bra to feel her bare skin—as her hips jerk and buck against his chin. Rey keens loudly as he suckles her clit and slides a thick finger inside her, pumping slowly.

Every noise he draws out of her, every sigh and whimper and moan as she rocks shamelessly against his open mouth, sends all his blood rushing to his cock. When she comes, with a sweet, drawn-out whine, its all he can do not to flip her over and push inside her right then. Instead, he leads her back down his body and tugs her into his side, her back pressed against his chest.

For a minute, she just lays still against him, catching her breath—and then she starts wriggling into him, grinding her ass against his hard-on.

He slides inside her slowly, relishing the feeling of her velvet soft cunt wrapped around him, his eyes fluttering at every hitch of her breath.

She can't see his face when he's fucking her like this. He really doesn't want to know what she'd find if she turned around and looked at him now. He's glad they're fucking in front of the TV and not a mirror.

He hates her. God, he hates her _so much_.

His fucking dream girl.

Ordinarily, this is when she leaves. After they've eaten, after they've had sex. Normally, she's gone by now.

But she doesn't leave. She prances around his apartment in her thin little bralette and cotton underwear (an outfit she maintains for the entire rest of the night; it keeps Ben in a state of constant, low-level arousal, but it's worth it). Acting for all the world like it's something she does every day.

After they have sex, she goes to the bathroom. Gets herself a glass of water. Nicks a clementine from the bowl of fruit on his counter and shoves her thumb into the top to pry it brutally open, citrus juice spraying over the heels of her palms, sticky and sour and sweet. The gesture seeming to him like a habit she developed as a child and never unlearned.

Ben asks her then, when she's shoving half of the clementine segments into her mouth, if she wants to watch something. She asks him if he knows what _The Christmas Prince_ is.

“No,” he says, confused. “But it's? Not Christmas?”

“Oh, Ben. _The Christmas Prince_ transcends seasons.” She pats him on the shoulder as she walks to the couch, her hand warm through the fabric of his undershirt, and steals the remote from him. “Trust me on this one.”

So they watch that. Rey laughs every time he points out how ridiculous it is, and agrees with him each and every time he tells her it's the worst movie he's ever seen.

And then, after that's over, she puts on another awful movie—this one involving some kind of love triangle, as far as he can tell?—and starts wandering around his living room as he calls his increasingly bewildered commentary to her over his shoulder.

Twenty minutes in, she says from behind him, “What is this?”

“Hmm?” He turns to where Rey is standing in his bedroom, visible through the doorway. She steps back into the living room, holding a picture frame in her hands. Flips the frame over to show him a photograph of himself at Stanford, years younger. “Oh,” he says. “That. Law school graduation.”

“Fancy, fancy.” Rey looks back over the photograph, peering at his face with a kind of scrutiny one usually reserves for oil paintings. “Your hair was shorter here.”

“More professional looking,” he explains, and her lips quirk up.

“You can see your ears.”

“God, don’t remind me.”

Her brow furrows. Her voice stubborn when she says, “I like your ears. Do you think you might have better hearing than other people?”

“I hope so. Maybe I can smell things better too,” he quips.

She hums, pleased. “That would be ideal.”

“Of course.” He throws an arm over the back of the couch as she returns to it, the picture frame still clutched in her slender fingers. “Otherwise I look like this for nothing.”

Her eyes flicker up to meet his briefly, before lowering back down to the photo again. “I like your nose, too,” she mumbles.

Ben clears his throat. His voice is a low rumble as he murmurs, “Yeah?”

Rey only traces a finger over the glass, her mouth slanting up. “Did you know this is the only picture I have seen in your apartment that’s of you?”

“Yes,” he says.

She looks at him fully, her expression open and curious. “Why?”

“I don’t really—” He sighs, shifting in his place. “I don’t like to think about it. About me. Who I was back then.”

She nods, seeming to accept this answer as it is. “Do you ever think you'll go back to it?” she asks, apropos of nothing.

Ben frowns. “Go back to what?”

“Law.”

“No,” he says. “I won't. At the beginning, after I got fired—well, pushed out, I guess, is the better term for it—”

“Pushed out?”

Ben blinks. He realizes, after a moment, he hasn't told the story in a while, not even to himself. “I didn't want to take on a case, so my boss made my life hell until I quit.”

Rey stares at him. “What was the case?” she says, after a moment.

“The usual.” He shrugs. “Guy was pushing for full custody, and he had the money and the means to get it. But he was an asshole, like all of the people we represented, and I just—I don't know. This time was different for some reason. I went to Snoke and asked to have him dropped as my client. And he didn't want me to. So I fucked up the case. Got him weekends and holidays.”

Rey grins. “On purpose?”

Another shrug. “Yeah, on purpose. Which he knew. So then, everyone knew. And I wouldn't be able to do family law in LA if people thought I was going to screw them over, so. So I quit the whole thing.” Ben sighs again, leaning back against the back of the couch, head turned towards Rey. Her legs are tucked under her body as she listens, folded up. His hand reaches out. Brushes her kneecap with his knuckles. “I told myself I only took the counseling job as a holdover. Something to do as a break. But it's not. I like what I do now.”

“So why go to law school in the first place then?”

Ben snorts. “Believe it or not, my original intention when I applied was to do child advocacy law.”

Her eyes light up in apparent interest. She wiggles deeper into the cushions, shimmying her body closer to his. “Really?” He nods, and she cocks her head. “Wow. What changed?”

“My parents got remarried,” he says simply. His eyes dart away from her, focusing at some point just beside her shoulder. “I took a job in divorce court as a way of saying _fuck you_ , I guess—not that that turned out any better. And they were pissed, understandably, with the change from what I was originally going to do. I fought with them every time they called me. Eventually, they just stopped calling.”

“That was all it took?” she asks softly. “They got remarried? It's just—I guess I just don’t understand. You have parents who love you and you—”

“Push them away?”

Rey is quiet for a moment, then says, only once he meets her gaze, “Yes.”

Ben searches her face. Looking, he thinks, for a trace of judgment, of resentment. He finds none. “Growing up they spent all their time fighting,” he says quietly, almost ruefully. “I didn’t—I was an only child, and I looked like this but weirder, and I didn’t have a lot of friends. It’s—they ignored me, a lot. And when they weren’t ignoring me they were fighting about me. Because I had all these—deficits. I wasn’t as smart as they thought I would be. I was angry most of the time. And when they got divorced, finally, they were so _relieved_. It was obvious. They were relieved because they didn’t have to pretend—”

He stops, suddenly, the words choking into nothing.

Rey is silent for a long moment, then. Like she might be giving him space to think. Eventually, she prods him gently, “Pretend what?”

“That—that they gave a shit.” He lets out a forced huff of laughter. “Look, I know I’m being...self-pitying. I know. But you always hear about these couples that split and keep fighting and keep fighting. God knows I’ve met plenty. You said it best: they use their kids as bargaining chips. Well, my mom and dad didn’t do that.”

Ben can hear how bitter he sounds, how petty and childish, and, for a second, he is ashamed. But as he speaks, Rey's expression doesn't change. She looks at him with neither pity nor disdain. Just something in her eyes that might be understanding.

"Their divorce was very amicable,” he goes on. “They didn’t fight over me at all. Fifty-fifty custody. Split right down the middle. They never missed a day to drop me off. They never fought for time. They picked me up and did pizza or ice cream or a baseball game, and then dropped me back off with a nice hug and a wave goodbye. Like I was their dog or something. Like I was just so— _easy_ to let go of. So, I don’t know. When they got back together, it felt like a slap in the face. Like, oh, sorry you didn’t have a childhood. But hey, now that you’re not our problem anymore, we’re happy again! Just like we were before you were born!”

They're both quiet then. In front of them, on the TV, the characters in the terrible movie continue to gasp loudly and overact every single line. “But you know that’s not true,” Rey says, still that soft, gentle voice.

“Yes.” He sighs, a long, slow release of air. “I know that’s not true.”

“But it hurt anyway.”

He nods. “Yeah. It hurt anyway.”

“It’s okay to still be hurt about it.”

Another nod, his eyes squeezing shut. “I know that.”

“Do you?”

Ben opens his eyes to see Rey already looking at him, intent and focused. “Do you remember how I told you what my dad said when I met him?" she says, seemingly out of nowhere. “How he asked me how much money it’d take for me to leave him alone?”

It takes him a moment to find his voice. He thinks, now, that he couldn't look away from her if he tried. “Yes.”

“I stayed in Chicago for a year. Working, taking classes at the community college.” Rey looks down. Takes a shuddering breath. “Waiting for him to change his mind,” she admits quietly. “I—I was convinced he’d turn around and want to get to know me if I just stayed for long enough.”

Ben waits for a moment, still gazing at her—oh god, this is gazing, he's _gazing_ at her, what the _fuck—_

“So why’d you leave?”

A small puff of laughter escapes her. “His secretary told me if I didn’t stop contacting him he’d take out a restraining order.”

His jaw tightens. “Fuck,” Ben says, the only thing he can reasonably and calmly express.

Rey rolls her eyes to the ceiling, affecting an air of detachment. “I knew she was bluffing. I’d only been to his office once. I’d only called a few times. But I was going through the immigration process, and I couldn’t risk anything. So one day I just—took him up on it.”

“On what?”

Her shoulders rise up to her ears. “On his offer. I told him if he paid for my schooling and the cost to move to Michigan, he’d never have to hear from me again.” Her mouth twists sadly, in a rueful half-smile. “I don’t think he’d ever cut a check so fast in his life.”

“Rey—”

“But it’s fine,” she goes on, determined. “It’s fine. Because it’s the best decision I could have made. I don’t have any debt. I’m not stuck trying to make someone want me who just doesn’t. And I met—”

She stops abruptly, hesitating.

Ben's heart throws itself against the cage of his ribs. His mouth goes dry.

“You met?”

“I met everyone,” she finally gets out. Ben's heartbeat slows, his lips churning. “Leia and Finn and Rose and Poe. But I just wish—I wish I hadn’t taken the money, sometimes. That I’d been above it. But I just—wasn’t.”

Ben's hand, the one he never took off of her knee, the one she's just barely touching with the tips of her fingers, slides further up her leg. Skates over her thigh, settles on her waist. Pulls her into his side, letting her adjust her weight against him until the top of her head is tucked under his chin, her shoulder nestled under his arm. “You shouldn’t have had to be,” he tells her, almost angry he even has to say it. Furious anyone could have made her feel like this. “He’s an asshole. And you shouldn’t feel bad about getting what you could from him. I don’t—Rey, I don’t know how he—I can't believe there's anyone who _wouldn’t_ want you. But it’s his loss. Not yours.”

He can feel her breathing. The slow rise and fall of her chest. Hear her shuddering intake of air. Her voice is small when she says, “Thank you, Ben.”

His eyes close at the words. At his name in her mouth.

“It's Chewbacca,” he mutters lowly, into her hair.

Rey sits up instantly, turning around to face him fully. “What?” she says, the question nearly a gasp. 

“My middle name.” Ben sighs, eyes screwed shut again momentarily before he looks up at the ceiling. “It's Chewbacca.”

A grin flashes across her face and stays there. Her hands tighten into cute little fists as she shifts into a kneeling position in front of him. Her excitement is palpable. Electric. “ _Really_?”

He nods. “Really.”

“Oh, Ben, that's—” Her smile widens. She pats him on the shoulder and offers him a faux-sympathetic expression. "That's so _embarrassing_.”

“Yeah,” he dismisses as the giggles start bubbling out of her, “yeah, okay, laugh it up.”

“ _Benjamin Chewbacca Organa Solo_ —”

“Okay, I really regret telling you this.”

“You're never going to live this down—”

“I know.” He should be annoyed at her obvious delight over this objectively humiliating fact about himself, but he isn't. In fact, he thinks he might be smiling more than he has all week. “I shouldn't have told you.”

“Too late,” she squeals gleefully, “it's too late, and now I know your deep dark secret, _Benjamin Chewbacca Organa_ —”

“That's it,” he announces, and promptly tackles her into the couch cushions, Rey shrieking with laughter the entire time.

She leaves close to midnight. She has to go home, she tells him. Get changed for work. Feed her cat. Et cetera.

Ben just nods, accepting her excuses. He walks her to the door (because he does that now, and when the hell did that happen?), where she waves goodbye and walks slowly down the hallway to the elevator.

He makes himself go back in before she disappears from his sight completely.

It isn't until later, when he's laying in bed, staring up at nothing in particular, thinking about the glow-in-the-dark stars that dotted the ceiling in his father's apartment—a way to make the room feel more like a child's room, more like the kind of room a son might have—that he realizes that the sick, knotted up feeling in the pit of his stomach means he wanted her to stay the night.

He really, really wanted her to stay the night.

And what the fuck, he wonders, is he supposed to do about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ In your mind, could you ever be really close to me? ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoR-zKXl-BA)


	28. the pigeon has feelings too!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK U [ FRAK ](https://twitter.com/AllFrak) FOR LISTENING TO ALL MY MUSINGS ABOUT THIS CHAPTER AND PROVIDING ~guidance~
> 
> and thank u to all of u for reading <3
> 
> go follow me on twitter [ @janedazey ](https://twitter.com/janedazey) if u r so inclined :)

** 28\. the pigeon has feelings too! **

It's late.

This is his excuse.

He's been coming up with a lot of those recently. Excuses to text her, excuses to invite her over, excuses to run into her in the hallways at school. For two weeks (two whole fucking _weeks_ ), Ben becomes a master at finding logically sound reasons to talk to Rey.

 _I saw what appears to be a real medieval sword being sold in the window of a pawn shop on my way to get groceries. Only seven hundred U.S. dollars. Do you want me to buy it for you?_ turns into a two hour long conversation over text that ends in Ben inviting her over. Ostensibly, it's to watch _Planet Earth_. In reality, he fucks her on his couch during the second episode, pumping into her from behind while she shivers and whines on his lap. And on a god damn school night.

 _u should stop shopping at whole foods because it's for dorks and it's owned by amazon and also i just saw hux there while i was on my run_ turns into Rey texting him a picture of her tits and telling him _i had a dream last night you fucked me and i woke up coming._ He fucks his fist with one hand and texts her with the other: _Are you alone?_ _Send me a picture of your pretty pink pussy. God you're so fucking wet._ _I want to lick your clit until you scream._ _Fuck yourself on your fingers for me and imagine it's my cock._

A conversation in the hallway after Ben drops Kyle off with Holdo turns into them walking together down to her room. Ben lingers even once they make it there, while Rey leans back against the arch of the doorway. They keep talking for more than ten minutes before he realizes he should probably be doing some actual work. He asks her before he goes, “Want to come over later?”

She smiles, wide enough that he can see all of her teeth, those cute fucking dimples in her cheeks that make him want to lose his mind completely, and tells him, “Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I can come over.”

And now, this. The last excuse. The lamest excuse.

Which is: it's late. She dozed off during the last half hour of _The Muppet Movie_ (her choice, obviously—he feigned annoyance while she sang the songs, while she did the Muppet voices, while she shrieked with delight no fewer than four times). They don't have work tomorrow. He doesn't want her to fall asleep at the wheel.

“I should go,” she says, rubbing her eyes after he shakes her awake on the couch. “I should—”

“You don't have to.” Ben rests his hands on his thighs. Opens them and closes them. “You can stay here. If you want.”

Rey looks confused, and he feels something inside him break, just a little bit. “But—that's—are you sure?”

“It's fine,” he says. “I don't mind.”

She asks him again when she's crawling under the covers of his bed, after he refuses her offer to sleep on the couch and she refuses his offer to do the same. She's buried in his duvet, only the top of her head visible. Just wild, frizzy hair and hazel eyes that keep drifting shut. Her voice is small when she says, “You're sure?”

Ben looks at her, and his heart clenches. Like it is being held tight, in an opening and closing hand. “Yeah,” he says. “I'm sure.”

He takes longer with his routine than he usually would—washes his face and moisturizes and brushes his hair in the exact way his mother taught him.

He tries not to think about it too much: how she’s in his bed, wearing one of his t-shirts, having used the spare toothbrush he bought a month earlier—just on a whim and for no particular reason, of course.

He tries not to think about her.

But he does.

By the time he gets back to bed, something fluttering in the pit of his stomach like a moth trapped in a room with an open window, Rey is already asleep.

She's underneath him, in his dream.

Ben wakes up with Rey in his arms. The clock on the nightstand, when he cranes his neck above her shoulder to see it, tells him it's just barely past seven.

Her back is pressed to his chest, his hands splayed out over her stomach. Her body is soft, her flesh yielding when he presses his fingers in and pulls her closer.

She shifts in his grip. Makes a quiet little sound that he thinks might stick in his brain forever.

“What time is it?” she murmurs, her voice raw and drowsy.

“A little after seven.”

She stirs awake, just a little bit, and tries half-heartedly to loosen herself from his hold. “I'm gonna be late, I need to—”

“No, you're not,” he reminds her. He strokes his fingers down her side. Slips them under her shirt— _his_ shirt—to trace a short path across the smooth skin under her naval. “It's Saturday.”

Slowly, she relaxes. “Oh.” She sighs and nestles into the covers again. “Okay.”

Ben closes his eyes. Nuzzles the back of her neck with the tip of his nose. “Go back to sleep,” he says gently.

And she does.

Rey gets up to go to the bathroom around nine. He feels her warmth leave his embrace for a few long minutes, the bed feeling strangely lopsided without her weight on the other side. He hears the sound of water running, the sound of bare feet on hardwood floors. When she returns, she buries herself back under the duvet and drapes herself against his side, her leg hitched over his waist, her hand curled around his neck, her cheek on his chest.

He thinks he might say to her, “You're back.”

He thinks she might reply, “Yeah, Ben, I'm back.”

It might just be another dream.

He wakes up fully only a little while after that. His eyes stay closed, but he's aware of himself, aware of Rey's body pressed against his. They're both on their sides again, but she's facing him this time, her knees trapping his thigh between her legs, her hands tucked together against his torso.

He doesn't want to be awake.

He doesn't want to have to get up and out of bed.

Eventually, after a few minutes, he opens his eyes.

And he's—

He can't even think of what to call it.

In sleep, Rey's face is gentle, undisturbed. Her eyelashes flutter against the tops of her cheeks as she breathes, deep and even. Her hair is a mess. There's a line of drool coming from the corner of her mouth that trails down onto his pillow.

She's so beautiful that he worries, for a moment, that he might actually die from it.

His hand reaches, of its own accord, and brushes the bow of her lips with the tip of his finger.

Rey's eyes squeeze shut tighter, and he draws his arm back quickly as she huffs out a breath.

“What was that?” she mumbles, blinking awake by inches.

“Nothing,” he murmurs, letting his hand fall again to the small of her back. “Nothing.”

She looks up at him. The sun coming in through the curtains is yellow and bright, casting her face in a golden glow. Her pupils are small in the light, making her eyes more green than brown.

Ben looks at her, and he looks at her, and he feels— _lost_.

“What are you staring at?” Her lips curve in a small smile, her sleepy eyes brightening with quiet mischief.

He answers quickly, without even pausing to think. “You.”

Her eyes widen. Her lips part. There's a pink flush on her cheeks that's so lovely, and he can see her pulse beating in her throat, and Ben doesn't think at all, he just _moves_. Just bends forward and presses his mouth into the side of her neck.

He kisses her throat with just the barest hint of teeth, and Rey _moans,_ the sweetest little sigh.

And he's hard—because of course he is, because it's the morning, and there's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen in his entire life with her legs wrapped around his leg and the thinnest scrap of fabric between his skin and the velvet heat of her center.

His fingers tighten in her shirt. He rocks her forward, into him, needing contact, needing _something_.

She moans again, hitched breath, almost needy this time.

His mouth closes around her pulse point. He _sucks_.

“Ben,” she murmurs, and now her hips are swiveling in gentle circles against his thigh, searching for friction. “Please.”

And he can't say no. Wouldn't ever.

He leans back again and slips his hands between their bodies and grabs the worn elastic of her panties. With one hand, he tugs the band up and together, while with the other he lightly drags his thumbnail against her clit through the fabric, rubbing a slow, teasing pattern.

Rey hums and shivers. Her fingers scrabble against his bare chest, her elbows bending as she wriggles closer to him.

“Please,” she repeats, and the word is cracked, and _god_ , what is he supposed to _do_ , it's too much, _she's_ too much, and he can't— “Please.”

He groans, and it's only another moment for him to roll her onto her back, to peel her underwear down and off her long, muscled legs. The duvet is off of them now, bunched up halfway down the bed, and it's dizzying, the way the sun shines off of her, the way he can already see the thin sheen of her arousal between her thighs.

He traces through her slit with his middle finger and groans again, louder this time, because she's dripping, she's all warm and soft and _dripping_ , and—

“God,” he mutters, “you're so wet, sweetheart.”

He shifts his weight, about to lower himself down her body and bend his head and taste her like she's the best meal he'll eat all day—and she is, she always fucking is—but her hand curls suddenly around his shoulder, stopping his progress.

“No,” she says, shaking her head, “no, I want—I just want to feel you inside me. I need your—” There's that flush on her face again, her expression so gentle and glowing. “I need your cock inside me—”

“Fuck,” he hisses, and he can't get to his nightstand fast enough. He jerks open the drawer, grunting out a curse when it catches wrong on its hinges, but he doesn't care enough to fix it. Behind him, Rey is sitting up, tugging his shirt off over her head and throwing it onto the ground, baring her pretty little tits to his wandering gaze.

Ben's hand finally finds the box of condoms. He pulls it out hastily, reaches his fingers into the cardboard, and it's—empty.

“Shit,” he mutters, and then says louder, “ _shit_.”

“What's wrong?”

He turns, and Rey is laid out on his mattress, legs spread apart, her face marred with confusion.

“I'm out,” he mumbles, the tips of his ears burning. “I should've gotten an extra box, but I—”

“I'm on birth control,” she interrupts suddenly. Ben blinks, and she goes on, matter-of-fact, “So you don’t need to worry about that. And I'm—” She pauses and huffs out a breath, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, as if trying to shift his attention to his overhead fan. “I'm clean, so—”

He blinks again. “Wait, you—what?”

“I'm religious about taking it,” she tells him, nodding seriously. “I actually took my pill for the day already when I got up to use the bathroom.”

“What?” he repeats, shifting away from his nightstand and closer to her. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I—” She hesitates, biting her lip. At her sides, her hands open and close. “A lot of reasons.”

Ben squeezes his eyes shut. Runs a hand through his hair. Opens his eyes again. “So I—you want me to—”

“I want you inside me,” she says, soft and quiet. “If you're good, too. If we're good. That's all. I just—I want _you_ , Ben.”

It's embarrassing, how quickly he moves after that.

In three swift motions, he's shucking off his underwear, grabbing Rey by the ankle, and dragging her down the bed. She squeals as she goes, her face lighting up in a smile, her eyes sparkling with mirth.

His hands skim over the insides of her thighs, parting them, spreading them open. Her skin is silken, so soft and supple, as he settles between her legs, lining up with her entrance.

He rocks into her slowly at first, sinking halfway in and back out. Rey huffs underneath him, struggling to take his cock without the lubricant on the condom easing his passage, and he might actually go crazy over this, he thinks. He might actually lose his mind.

She plants her feet on the bed, her knees bent, her hips rising to meet his. She keeps whining and whimpering, needy little sounds that could be the word please over and over again: _please, please, please._ The more he thrusts, the wetter she gets, and the more her body opens up for him, all tender and warm.

When he finally seats himself fully inside her, they both groan, mouths falling open.

“God damn it,” he breathes. “You feel so—Christ, Rey, you feel too good.”

Her fingers tighten around his biceps, digging in. “I need you to move,” she tells him desperately. “Ben, please, I want—”

He pulls back slowly and pushes forward, inching deeper and deeper, and she moans, the sound high-pitched and helpless.

“Yes,” she begs. “Just like—fuck me just like that.”

So he fucks her. Just like that—careful and slow, rolling his body into hers, driving his cock deep inside her wet, waiting cunt. Rey keeps letting out little whines and squeaks as he moves, lifting herself up to meet his thrusts, her body just giving and _giving_ for him.

Ben can’t even tell how long they’ve been moving when she gasps for him to change positions. He lays down on his side behind her and angles his cock up and inside her. She’s so _wet_ , wet and dripping all the way down the back of her thighs, around the curve of her ass. Covering him entirely in her. He wraps his arm around her torso, holding her closer, pushing her tits together and pinching her nipples with his thick fingers. The other hand he slides down between her legs, rolling her clit in frantic little circles, barely able to get any friction with the way she’s turned to liquid around him.

He’s never been so turned on in his life, he registers distantly. He’s never been so out of himself and yet so aware of every little thing around him. He’s never been so—

Rey twists her upper body in his grip as she fucks back against him, reaching her arm up to curl around the back of his neck, fingers tightening in his hair. Her eyes flutter, opening and closing, her lashes making crescent-shaped shadows on her cheeks, her lips part, she whimpers, and he tilts his head and kisses her.

Every part of their bodies touch. Every single part.

Rey gasps suddenly, her legs tensing, hands trembling and scrambling for something to hold onto.

“I think,” she whines, her mouth brushing his, “Ben, I think I’m gonna—”

He feels it when she comes. Feels her shuddering, quivering limbs, feels her heave for breath, feels her keening, the sound vibrating through her chest. He feels her cunt clutch around his cock, pulsate, so fucking tight and warm and sweet he follows her over the edge almost immediately. He only thrusts into her once, maybe twice, before he's groaning and driving into her harshly, pumping her full of his come.

He comes back down slowly, panting, his lungs straining for air. In his arms, Rey lets out a small noise and sighs, squirming further into his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he manages after a moment, his voice hoarse and cracked almost in two. He kisses the undercut of her jaw and noses into her hair. “I didn’t ask if I could come inside you.”

Rey shivers, her upper arms pebbling with goosebumps. She takes a deep, shaky breath. “I wanted you to,” she says quietly.

His eyes close briefly. His jaw tenses.

They lay there like that for a long moment, both of them. Eventually, Ben has to pull out. He does so with a muffled curse and rearranges himself onto his back, his arm hooked around her shoulder. Rey tucks herself against him, her knuckles pressing into his side.

Neither of them says a word.

Ben feels, strangely, like his mind is racing, but like it's still going exactly nowhere. It does nothing but lead him in confusing directions that all seem to point to the exact same thing, if he can just figure out what that thing is.

He takes a breath and opens his mouth, about to say her name, when the silence is interrupted by his phone, buzzing obnoxiously on his nightstand.

A muscle under his eye twitches, and he considers, for a moment, letting it ring through. But there's only one person who would call him on a Saturday morning, and Ben knows he won't be deterred by a push to voicemail.

He rolls over and shoves the still ajar drawer closed, then rips his cell off his charging cord.

“It's my dad,” he explains, glancing back to Rey. She struggles into an upright position, folding her knees into her chest. Ben smiles, somewhat apologetically. “Believe me when I say he really won't stop calling until I pick up.”

Rey's lips quirk up. “No worries,” she murmurs. She grins wider, cheekily. “Have fun talking to your dad, Solo.”

The grin widens on his own face. He shifts into a seated position on the edge the bed as the call rings through, ends, and then picks right back up again. He tugs on his boxer-briefs and a plain t-shirt from his dresser, and he pads on bare feet to his kitchen.

He can hardly even muster up any annoyance when he answers the call with a resigned, “Why are you calling me on a Saturday morning?”

Han's voice is gruff and affectionate. “Now is that any way to greet your old man?”

“It is if my old man is irritating the fuck out of me.”

“Language,” his father chastises automatically, “and I'm calling because Chewie wanted to see if you can make it to his niece's quinceañera on Friday.”

Han always says the word with a regular _n_ sound. Ben chooses not to comment on this.

“This is something you had to call me to confirm?” he sighs heavily.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I mean, I guess, but Chewie really needs to give me more than a week's notice in the future—”

“Oh, why,” Han says mockingly, “you got a hot date or something?”

“Ben?”

Rey’s voice floats through his apartment, loud with the door to his bedroom open. Ben freezes, tightening his free hand into a fist.

“I don’t understand the dials to this shower,” she goes on, “can you come—”

Ben clears his throat and cuts her off, glancing back toward his bedroom. “In a minute,” he calls back, covering the bottom of his phone with his hand as if it were the landline in his childhood home.

He turns back around and walks sullenly to his fridge, pressing his hand against the smooth metal door.

On the other end of the line, he can practically hear the gears turning in his father’s head.

After a moment, Han finally speaks.

“Who was that?”

Ben feigns nonchalance. “That? Nobody. No one.”

“You got a girl over?” His father pauses, letting the words hang meaningfully in the air. “You got a girlfriend, kid?”

A forced laugh curls sharply from his throat. “Girlfriend? No, _definitely_ not.”

“Ah.” Han, Ben is displeased to note, does not sound convinced. “Well, I’ll let you go then.”

“Fine,” Ben sighs again. He pushes his knuckles against the refrigerator door. “I’ll see you on Friday.”

“See you, kid,” Han says cheerfully. “Say hi to your _nobody_ for me.”

His dad hangs up first, the sound of a call ended beeping loudly in Ben’s ear.

Ben drops his arm back to his side, his phone with it. He rubs the hollow of his eye with the heel of his palm, drags his hand down his face.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing that Han knows something about Rey, he decides after a moment. It's not like his dad will pester him too much. Ben’s just not really ready to say anything to his parents about it, about what they're doing, what they have.

Whatever it is that they have.

Something new, he thinks. And good. And—just _perfect_ , really. Really just perfect.

He walks back to his bedroom more quickly than he left it, wanting to return while Rey is still in the shower, hopefully having figured out the dials. He imagines stepping in behind her, encircling her in his arms, running his hands along her body all slippery with soap. And maybe after, he thinks suddenly, they can—go somewhere. Together. Maybe for breakfast. She told him she likes french toast, after all, and there’s a brunch place near his building that he’s never really wanted to try but it’s supposed to be good. He's pretty sure he’s heard Poe mention it before.

Rey would probably like it.

Ben walks through the open door, and he’s so distracted by his own thoughts that he almost doesn’t see Rey standing there, next to his bed, tugging her Garfield t-shirt back over her head. Her shorts are already on, buttoned up and high on her waist, and she’s already toeing on her shoes when he doubles back on his way to the bathroom.

He stands in front of her, on the other side of the bed.

Her hair is dry, he realizes distantly. Then he says aloud, in a voice that sounds very far away from him, “Why are you getting dressed?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I hate to admit it, but I don't know shit. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpIeSFF1DnU)


	29. timmy failure: mistakes were made

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many more thanks 2 [ frak ](https://twitter.com/AllFrak) who is fabuloso and listens to all of my inane ramblings and continues 2 provide GUIDANCE
> 
> OBLIGATORY SELF PROMO: follow me on twitter :^) [ @janedazey ](https://twitter.com/janedazey)

** 29\. timmy failure: mistakes were made **

At the sound of his voice, Rey glances up at Ben.

There must be something in his face that she doesn’t like, though, because she looks right back down again. Holding her balance on one foot, she brings her knee up to her chest and ties her shoe as she dangles her calf in the air. She repeats the process with the other foot while Ben watches, his heart in his throat.

Once she’s satisfies with her handiwork, she dusts her hands off and looks at him blankly.

“I’m getting dressed because I’m going home,” she says, every word enunciated, clear and concise.

“Okay.” He shrugs, helpless. “Why?”

She sighs and moves away from the bed, toward the door.

Ben follows her automatically as she leaves his bedroom (his bedroom, his bed, where she was under him just now, where he fucked her until she came, where she woke up in his arms and he—)

Rey gathers up her purse and its contents. It had spilled out across the floor by the sofa the night before, when she accidentally knocked it over while swinging her legs up from the ground to drape them over his knees.

Because he was kissing her. Because they were kissing. Because they were—

“Why what, Ben?”

He shakes his head. His lips churn.

“Why—why are you going home?” he asks, his voice rough and scraped raw.

Her shoulders inch up toward her ears. She lifts her hair up in a curtain behind her head and lets it fall back with a sigh. “Because I have plans.”

His stomach twists. He tries—and fails—to sound exceedingly casual as he replies, “Oh, you do? With who?”

Her eyes narrow, mean. “I really don’t think that’s any of your business.” Every syllable is clipped, spit from her mouth like bullets.

She turns away from him, toward his front door, and Ben just—

“Why don’t you want to tell me?” he asks suddenly. Rey turns back toward him, and he isn’t relieved that she’s not going just yet, this isn’t relief, what he’s feeling seeing her look at him again, it’s— “Is it—are you going on a date or something?”

Her spine straightens as she draws herself to her full height. “What if I am? What does that matter to you?”

“I—” He gropes blindly for a reason. “Because it wouldn’t be fair to the other guy. Since we’re—”

“Fucking?” she says, at the same time that he lamely finishes, “Sleeping together.”

Rey scoffs. “Sleeping together? I don’t see that.”

Ben blinks. His stomach untwists itself and sinks down his body, settling somewhere around his shoes. “We just did. Just now, you—”

“That was an aberration,” she interrupts.

“What?”

“A mistake,” she goes on, dismissing him instantly. “Actually, you know what, this whole thing, is—I’ve been thinking about this, and I think we should stop.”

His mouth is as dry as a desert. His thumb traces the nail of his index finger over and over again. “Stop?”

“Stop sleeping together.” She shrugs, adjusting the strap of her purse on her shoulder. “If that’s what you want to call it. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I really feel like it’s run its course.”

“What?” His head shakes. “No.”

Rey snorts, derisive. “I’m sure you’ll sorely miss getting laid on the regular, but I think this is best.”

“But, I thought—” He hesitates, then, unsure of how to continue. What did he think, after all? What did he really think this was? He changes tack instead, his voice bordering on something too close to desperation. “We’re having fun, right? Weren’t you having fun?”

“I was. Not anymore.”

He doesn't get it. He doesn't get it, he doesn't know what's—

“But I still am,” he says. Rey is still standing near the door, now jingling her car keys in her hand, looking in every direction but his. Ben takes a step closer, hating the fact that this is happening now, that it's happening at all, that he doesn't even have his fucking pants on for this conversation. “So what’s wrong, what changed?”

“I don’t want it anymore,” she bursts out, too loud for the space. “I don’t—I don’t _want_ this with you.”

His stomach can't sink any lower. Which is fine. Now, it feels like the organ has been completely removed from his body. “Why not?”

“Because I want a fucking boyfriend, Ben,” she snaps. “And I don’t really need this distracting me from that.”

His jaw tenses. He swallows hard, and it feels like it catches on something in his throat, like there's something stuck there. “Distracting you. I’m a distraction.”

“ _Yes_.” She nods her head, brisk, and turns away. “So, if you’ll excuse me—”

Ben's not thinking at all anymore. Because if he were thinking, he'd probably be able to figure out what happened. What went so— _wrong_.

But he can't. He can't thinking of anything besides _don't leave don't leave don't leave—_

“What changed?” he demands.

She sighs heavily. “ _Nothing_ changed. I already told you, this has just run its c—”

“That’s bullshit.”

Her mouth drops. Her eyebrows tilt together dangerously. “Excuse me?”

“Bullshit. We were just—having sex less than twenty minutes ago, and now—”

“One for the road, right?”

It feels like she knocked the wind out of him. “Rey.”

“Listen, we both knew this wasn’t going anywhere. That was the point, right? Isn’t that what we agreed?” Ben stays stubbornly quiet, his eyes fixed somewhere around the point of her shoulder. “And we did it and it’s over now, and I really don’t need the distraction if I’m going to—”

Rey waves a hand through the air, as if brushing the thought aside, brushing _him_ aside, and he is suddenly and inescapably livid.

“You didn’t seem so worried about me distracting you last night,” he cuts her off, his voice cruel and mocking. She finally meets his gaze again, and he feels a flash of triumph at her expression, no longer so even and unaffected. “When I ate your tight little cunt until you were begging me to fuck you—”

Her face screws up with anger. “Shut up—”

“—or this morning, when you came all over my cock—”

“Shut the fuck up, Ben,” she hisses, body lurching toward him in an aborted step forward.

Ben takes that step for her, and another, until the distance between them is halved, the space of only a few feet.

“Make me,” he grits out.

Rey frowns, her lower lip trembling for the briefest moment before her jaw sets in a hard line.

“Fuck this.” she mutters, turning toward the door again. “I don’t need this.”

“Yeah, alright,” Ben scoffs. “Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart.”

She snaps back toward him in a heartbeat. “Excuse me? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means have the best fucking time on your date tonight—”

“I _never_ said I was going on a date—”

“—because you’re going to come knocking on my door the minute it’s over, begging me to make you come.”

Rey's lips part in shock. Ben's blood roars in his ears. “You know what, Ben?” Her neck cranes back as she inches closer to him, leaving barely a foot of space between their bodies (her body under his, his body inside hers, her body all warm and soft with sleep)— “I don’t know what the _fuck_ your problem is.”

“Oh, you don’t know what my problem is?”

“No, I really don’t. Oh, wait, I get it—” The smile on her face is glacial; her eyes burn. “You’re pissed that you’re not calling all the shots for the first time in your life. That _I’m_ the one that’s ending things.”

He balks. “What? No, that’s not—”

“Typical fragile male ego—”

“That isn’t what I—”

“Did you think this was going to last for-fucking-ever?”

He thinks his heart might stop beating. His voice cracks when he eventually manages to croak out, “What?”

“Did you think I’d really want to sleep with you for the rest of my—”

“No, no, I—” He stammers, suddenly. He can't catch his breath, he can't picture the sentence in his brain, he doesn't even know what the rest of the sentence looks like. “I—”

“Then what’s confusing you, exactly? Because I think it makes perfect sense. We did our thing, I’m over it, I’m not going to keep explaining—”

“I—”

“—why I think it’s best we just call it now and leave—”

“I—”

“—each other alone so we can go back to being mild acquaintances and I can move—”

“Rey—I—”

“—the fuck _on_ with my life, because this isn’t what I want, I want to have a family, I want to get married, and you don’t, and that’s _fine_ , and I really don’t give a shit, but I’m _done_ with this now, I’m done being cool and casual and _cool_ about everything, I’m not a cool girl, and it’s not fun for me and I don’t want this to become a habit I form like fucking heroin—”

“I—I—I—”

“What?” she shrieks, throwing her arms in the air. “You _what_ , Ben, spit it the fuck out—”

“ _I love you!_ ”

Rey's jaw snaps shut with an audible click.

There's a distant ringing in Ben's ears, a hum of sound. For a heartbeat, he convinces himself there's no way in hell he said what he said.

It has to be a dream. Standing in front of her, he doesn't even feel real.

He feels untethered. And very, very small.

And he is—

He's in—

“ _What?_ ”

Love.

He's in love.

Rey's expression is some terrible mix of shock and horror, as if he's just poured gasoline all over the floor of his living room and decided to casually light a cigarette.

“Rey.” He takes a step toward her, and, at the same time, she moves back. Like a magnet rolling across a table. Repelling. “Rey, please, I can—”

“You _love_ me?”

Her eyes are dark and filled with fury. This, he thinks, must be what it is to feel his heart breaking.

How funny that it's never happened to him before.

His mouth opens, but no sound comes out. Instead, he just stands there dumbly, incapable of doing anything but breathe.

Exist.

Barely.

Rey's expression flickers, just before her face hardens.

She says crisply, every word shaped by her mouth like another cut, “I thought I was no one.”

He inhales sharply.

Blinks.

And she's gone.

He doesn't really know how long he stands there for.

It feels like hours.

It's probably no more than a minute or two.

He doesn't care enough to keep track.

Ben has always hated people who can't stop talking about love. The kind of people who let their lives fall by the wayside the second they get into relationships. Who offer unsolicited dating advice and make jokes about _balls-and-chains_ and _going-home-to-the-missus_ and _worst-mistake-of-my-life-was-getting-married-haha-it's-a-trap!_ The kind of people who recite unhelpful platitudes like _it'll happen when you least expect it_ and _love is patient love is kind love means never having to say you're sorry_ and _you'll know it when you feel it_.

He's always known those people were full of shit.

Because, really, how could he know for sure? How could _anyone, anywhere, at all, ever_ know for sure?

It's not a diagnosable thing. Or transmitted via sex. Like an STI.

It's just supposed to be... _something_. Understood and felt and _known_.

Bullshit, he decided a long time ago.

Complete and utter bullshit.

Ben knows now though.

He knows for sure that he's in love. He couldn't begin to name how he knows it—and, yes, he understands the irony of that now—just that he does know it. Just that he feels it.

He doesn't even really know when it started. It could have been creeping up on him slowly from the second they met, like some B-movie monster. Or maybe it's newer than that: something that dropped down on him, ridiculous and unavoidable as a cartoon safe.

It probably doesn't matter anyway.

He always did have the worst sense of timing.

It really was remarkably simple, he thinks, how quickly his entire life was fucked.

Ben moves like he's in a fog.

He grabs his keys.

He shoves his feet into the first pair of shoes he finds.

He walks out of his apartment with only the thought of her in his mind—the thought of stopping her before she can drive away, and confessing to her how entirely stupid and in denial he's been (for weeks, for months, for the entirety of his life). Showing her that she's not no one, despite—despite what he said. She could never be no one.

Not to him, at least.

Actually, not at all.

He takes the stairs three steps at a time, unwilling to wait for the elevator.

He has no idea what he'll say when he reaches the ground. All he knows is that seconds are precious, and with every single one that slips by she gets further and further away from him.

Perhaps he shouldn't be so surprised when he finds her parking spot empty.

It feels like the worst kind of deja vu.

“Fine,” he says to himself, his voice hideously bright. “This is fine.”

So he's reached the _talking out loud to himself_ stage of lovesick panic.

Great.

He sprints to his own car instead.

Why is he sprinting, he can't help but wonder, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like his father's. Who does he think he is? Tom Cruise? Is he running through an airport to stop a plane? Is he in _Jerry Maguire_?

He might be in _Jerry Maguire_.

The adrenaline lasts as long as it takes for him to open up the door to his car and sit inside.

Because he is, for lack of a better way to describe it, a complete fucking mess.

He's not dressed. Doesn't even have his pants on. He is wearing, he notices, the most horrible slide sandals that his father remains convinced is somehow cool and Ben wears only when he has lost control of himself completely, i.e., when he's hungover. He doesn't have his wallet or his phone. He can't even call her to warn her he's about to show up at her apartment and win her over, like Tom Cruise and _Jerry Maguire_ and he's starting to really regret coming up with that particular comparison because _no thank you_ and—

Ben groans and leans forward, resting his forehead on the knuckles gripping the steering wheel.

He can't go back to his apartment. He just—can't.

Eventually, he puts the key in the ignition and turns the car on.

He drives.

He goes to the only place he can think to go.

His mother answers the door.

She covers up her shock at seeing him there, in nothing more than a white undershirt, boxer-briefs, and slip-on shower shoes, with much more grace and dignity than his father could have ever managed.

“Ben,” she says, her mouth opening in an ‘o’ of surprise. “What on earth are you doing here dressed like that?”

He smiles weakly. Says, “Hi, Mom.”

Leia blinks. Then sweeps an arm at Ben, gesturing for him to come inside. “Well, don't just stand there,” she says after a moment. “Your father has been driving me up the wall about his fancy speaker system, and I'm sure you'll be the only one who can fix—”

Her sentence cuts off abruptly.

She takes a step closer.

“Benji?” she asks softly.

The lingering confusion on her face dims and fades, replaced with concern. It's so tender, so... _maternal_ , it makes him want to cry.

Which he is, he registers distantly. He's standing on the front porch of his childhood home, and he's crying. About a girl.

“Hi, Mom,” he says again, his voice thick and watery. “Can I talk to you about something?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Just don't leave. Don't leave. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbVKGlh3gg4)


	30. the boy with big, big feelings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello sorry for the million years between updates, i was tired for a long time. thank you for being patient!! also sorry for the super long note thats about to follow:
> 
> SOME HOUSEKEEPING:
> 
> THERE HAS BEEN ART!!! [noni](https://twitter.com/lightrayder) commissioned [laura barcali](https://twitter.com/LBarcali) to create a piece based on the supply closet scene in chapter five!!! [LOOK UPON IT AND DESPAIR](https://twitter.com/LBarcali/status/1274091504068431873?s=20) it's so BEAUTIFUL!!!! this happened like a month and a half ago but i completely forgot to link it here!!!!
> 
> MORE ART!!!! this time for the ending of chapter 29!!!!! [@tazelladraws](https://twitter.com/tarzelladraws) did a [sketch](https://twitter.com/tarzelladraws/status/1283403115253731330?s=20) and a [finished piece](https://twitter.com/tarzelladraws/status/1283616108860157952?s=20) of lil baby ben standing on his front porch and it was so lovely and sweet i died and my ghost is writing this 
> 
> YET ANOTHER: [ana](https://twitter.com/twbyana) made the most adorable diptych moodboard of rey and ben [HERE!!!](https://twitter.com/twbyana/status/1285746656487649288?s=20)
> 
> whew. one more. thank u to [frak](https://twitter.com/AllFrak) for helping get me unstuck for this chapter.
> 
> IMPORTANT ASIDE: i wrote a little rey pov companion piece to accompany the space between last chapter and this chapter. you can read it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25496461)
> 
> now with that: we approach the end. i am ending this fic at 31 chapters for the main story, plus an epilogue to bring it to 32. i'm tacking on that change in the chapter count, but rest assured the main story is ending NEXT CHAPTER. 32 is just a lil bonus.
> 
> thank you to everyone who has stuck with me!!!! i can't believe this fic is almost over wow.
> 
> with that, i will leave u all to READ
> 
> bonus points for the person who can spot the extremely obvious metaphor i put in

** 30\. the boy with big, big feelings **

His mother insists that he take a shower first.

After Ben calms down a little bit, once his tears have dried up and etched visible tracks along his face, like a child crying after falling in the dirt, Leia holds his hand in hers and tells him seriously, “Go freshen up, Benjamin.”

It's the kind of thing she'd say to him as a child. A mother's wisdom, she'd opine. _Sleep on it. Take a shower. Eat breakfast. Go outside for a little while and feel the sun on your skin. It’ll all seem better in the morning._

It’s made slightly more mortifying when he realizes it’s probably at least partly because he still smells like sex.

His old bathroom is empty and unused, so Leia lets him use their shower. Han's cleansing products are all dismal, three in one shampoo/conditioner/body wash, a habit Leia could never rid him of.

Ben grimaces, and he reaches for his mother’s hair care set.

He stands under the drumming water, letting it beat down on his back, on the top of his head. Drops sluice down his shoulders, clings to wet locks of hair. He thinks of Rey, kneeling in front of him, her mouth open. His fingers in her wet cunt, opening her up like the lock of a door. The way she welcomed him inside her body. How, when he held her in his arms, he couldn't imagine doing anything else. How he felt so unbearably _happy_ —how his heart ached, swelled impossibly huge, fit to burst.

How he ignored all of that, unwilling to admit to it.

A week ago, in his apartment, Rey watched him while he cooked dinner. She sat on top of his counter, slender fingers drumming on the marble, and swung her legs to and fro. She was telling him a story, a long one, about what she and Finn did at the Renaissance Faire, and more than one sentence contained the word _troubadour_. He called her a geek, and she laughed, sweet and joyful.

He loves the sound of her laugh.

He remembers how he caught her foot in one hand as he passed her on the way to the stove. He held her there, thumb rubbing her ankle, as he stirred the saucepan absentmindedly. Rey kept talking; she didn’t even look down at where he was touching her.

Then, when the food was ready, when she hopped down and grabbed her plate from him with greedy hands—he leaned into her and kissed her without a word.

Rey kissed him back. Her fingers stroked through his hair, tucking it behind his ears.

When they broke apart, she went right back to telling her story.

Ben has no idea how he managed to ignore it before—how he was so in love. It’s obvious, in retrospect, the way a car crash is obvious, only once it’s already happened. Once the ambulances have come and the hood is crumpled up like paper and the driver is sitting on the sidewalk with one of those silver blankets on his shoulders saying, “I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.”

Which, yeah. Ben guesses he just wasn’t paying attention.

Because he knows it now, with the benefit of hindsight. How in love he is. Horribly, utterly, _maddeningly_ in love. Even right now, dazed and terrified and overwhelmed, and with the steam making him feel faintly dizzy.

But maybe that's just his heart, too, beating in his chest, tender and battered.

It feels...awful.

But it's also the best thing in the world, being in love.

It's not something he’s ever felt before.

A startled laugh bubbles out of his throat, the sound of it dim under the rush of water, and it chokes into a noise like a sob.

Leia never emptied his dresser. Never changed a thing about his bedroom. Even after he graduated from high school, college, law school, even after he stopped talking to them, she left his room just the way it was when he was eighteen. He digs an old pair of sweatpants out of the bottom drawer of the dresser and tugs them on. The elastic is slightly too tight around his hips, the hem just a little too high around his ankles, but they'll do.

He walks downstairs, clomping his feet on the floorboards like he did when he was a teenager. Lingering instinct, he supposes. The ease of being at home.

When he gets to the living room, his mother is nowhere in sight.

“She went out.” Han peeks out from behind the entertainment hutch, his face red with exertion and frustration, presumably from trying to fix his broken soundsystem. “Said something about going to the mall. I think she's planning on buying you a whole new look, kid.”

Ben groans, partly in annoyance and partly in affection. Just like his mother, after all—aspirational as ever.

His father pauses as Ben makes his way around the couch, his hair still dripping down over his shoulders, dampening the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

“How are you doing, kid?”

Ben shrugs, strolling closer to where Han is grumbling around the speaker, his hands digging into a nest of confusing wires. Ben doesn’t know much about technology, or about fixing things, or about speaker systems, but even he can tell his dad isn’t making much progress.

“Here,” he mutters, pushing his father away so he can pull the whole unit out of the hutch and arrange it onto the floor. “Let me.”

So Han does. He lazes about on the couch, watching idly as Ben fumbles with a screwdriver and Google, balancing his phone precariously on his crossed knee as he looks for help online.

“This is why you have children,” his dad muses, almost thoughtfully. “Someone to do your dirty work when you're old.”

Ben snorts. “You always had me doing your dirty work. Didn't matter how old I was. Remember when you had me tell that cop mom was giving birth?”

“Hey,” Han says, raising his hands in mock-defense, “my license could’ve been suspended if I got another speeding ticket. You saved my ass there, buddy.”

Ben waves a hand, turning his attention back to his work. “Yeah, yeah.”

For a minute, they're both quiet. Ben struggles, huffing out curses under his breath at the tangled mess, and his father watches.

“So,” Han says eventually, breaking the comfortable silence. “Tell me about this girl.”

Ben lets out a puff of air. “Who said there's a girl?” he challenges, slipping back into that easy avoidance. He scrubs a hand over his forehead, wiping off the beads of sweat that gathered. “Maybe my apartment building burned down. Maybe my fern died.”

Han levels him with his most skeptical look. “Ben,” he says flatly. When Ben only stares at him in response, Han sighs again, more heavily this time. “I hate to be the first to tell you, but you haven't exactly been the picture of subtlety.”

Ben rolls his eyes. “Pot, kettle, Dad.”

“I know it's about a girl,” Han goes on. “And that's okay. Hey, look at me.”

His dad pauses. Waits for Ben to lift his head back up and meet his gaze. “That's why you came here,” Han says, every word slow and clear. “And I'm here for you. Whenever you want to tell me. _Whatever_ you want to tell me. And I promise you this: whatever you did, it's no worse than anything I've done.”

Ben bites his lip. His fingers twitch, thumb stroking along the nail of his index finger. He doesn't know, exactly, where to start.

He feels younger than he is. Foolish as a child.

But Han isn’t looking at him the way he did sometimes when Ben was a kid, the way Ben does sometimes around his own students—like Han is in on some great, cosmic joke that Ben just wouldn’t _get_.

Han is looking at him like he knows every bad thing Ben did, and he understands every single one.

The knowledge of that makes Ben’s throat tighten. He swallows, licks his lips.

“Do you remember Rey?” Ben manages after a moment.

Han's mouth twitches, slanting into a half-smile. “Yeah, kid, I remember her.” He pauses, as if waiting for his son to continue. When he doesn't, Han goes on himself, filling in the blanks, “Was she your nobody?”

Ben can’t speak. He nods instead.

His dad leans forward, eyes bright and knowing.

“Is this story going where I think it is?”

Ben manages an ironic sort of laugh at that, the sound a wreck. “Probably,” he says. “Where do you think it’s going?”

His father hesitates, seeming to think very deeply about this question. “I think,” he says eventually, slow and considered, “that you’ve been on this road for a long time. Maybe longer than you want to admit.”

Ben hedges. “Maybe.”

 _Obviously_. 

He remembers— _everything_. The first day he laid eyes on her, the first time he said her name, when he first kissed her, when she first looked at him like he might be—

Like he could be someone she could—

Doesn’t matter.

He remembers every single thing—except for when he tripped and stumbled blindly into love. Love like falling down a flight of stairs: disastrous.

“I think,” Han says quietly, “you’ve been afraid that being honest about what you want opens you up to being disappointed when you don’t get it. And I think Rey probably heard you tell me she wasn’t your girlfriend.”

A flash of a rueful smile crosses his face. “Got it in one, Dad.”

Han shrugs, hands splayed out at his sides. “It’s a gift.”

“Sure.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Ben blinks. His hands still for a brief moment, before he goes back to plucking out a stray wire with a pair of pliers. “What do you mean?”

“I mean just what I said—what are you going to do about it?”

If there is some meaning in the question, it’s entirely obfuscated by the lack of clear definition. Ben asks, irritable, “About _what_ , exactly?”

“About your nobody.”

Ben scoffs. His eyes drop back to his phone, to a series of diagrams that he’s pretty sure he hasn’t been following correctly. “There’s nothing for me to do, Dad. It is what it is.”

“And what is _it_?”

The screwdriver clatters to the floor as Ben moves, pulling his knees up in front of his body so he can rest his elbows on top. He scrubs both hands over his face, hard. “Jesus fu—is this Who’s On First?”

Dad holds his hands out to his sides, making a gesture of _well isn’t it obvious?_ “It’s an honest question. What is _it_?”

“ _It’s_ over,” Ben bursts out. His voice is wretched and horribly thick, and it’s the first time he’s let himself realize it. That she ended things. Broke up with him, if that’s the appropriate phrasing. That he tore open the cavity of his chest and pulled out his heart, still beating, and she took one look and said, _nah, I’m good_.

For good reasons, of course, for perfectly logical and perfectly sound reasons—but that doesn’t make him feel any better. It might actually make him feel worse, knowing he has no one to blame but himself.

How could she know if he never told her?

“It’s over,” he rambles, “it’s over, and I already—I fucked it up, okay? I didn’t—I couldn’t say what I wanted in time and I fucked up every single thing beyond repair and it’s over and that’s it. Happy now?”

After his outburst, his dad just looks at him. Steadily. He says, measured and thoughtful, “Then why are you here?”

“I don’t know,” he says bitterly. “To lick my wounds until I’m—until I’m okay to go back.”

“Is that what you want to do? Hole up here, licking your wounds, until you have to go back?”

“What’s with the twenty questions?”

“I’ll stop asking when you start telling. What do you want?”

“I want to...” Ben sighs heavily. Crosses his arms protectively over his chest. “I don’t know. Go back in time. To not have done any of what I did. To just have been honest from the beginning.” He snorts, derisive. “Or at least a little bit fucking self aware.”

Han widens his eyes and shakes his head. “Well, it’s too late for that.”

“Yes, I know that,” Ben snaps.

“So I’ll ask again: what do you _want_?”

“I want—I want—” He hesitates, realizing he’s been gnawing his index fingernail. He swipes his hand over his mouth, frowning in thought. “I want Rey. That’s all.”

Han leans back on the couch, clearly more satisfied with Ben’s answer. He taps his chin, a show of wizened consideration. “Be more specific.”

Ben groans. “Dad—”

“Kid, just listen. Let me learn you something big.”

Ben raises his eyebrows. “Oh, is that what’s happening?”

“Fucking up is normal. It’s human. It’s part of being alive. And being in love.” Han pauses, careful. Deliberate. “Because you’re in love with her. Right?”

Ben lifts his eyes to the ceiling and rolls his spine down until he’s laying on the floor. A huff of laughter escapes him. “Right,” he says after a moment. “I am.”

“So be more specific.”

He speaks to the ceiling. Distantly fearful that if he looks at his dad, all of his weepy romantic emotions will spill out of him and all over the floor between them like a dropped plate of fucking spaghetti. Embarrassing. “I want...to be with her. All the time. I want to make her happy. I want—” He flushes dark. “I want her to be my girlfriend.”

For a moment, the words hang in the air, like an under-filled balloon. The silence is broken by Han clapping his hands together. “Okay,” he says briskly. “Now go tell _her_ that.”

Ben makes a noise of disbelief, pushing back into a sitting position. “You say it like it’s so easy.”

“It isn’t,” his father says. “It’ll probably be the hardest thing in the world, telling her what you want. Because it means she can say no. And if you’re right and you fucked it up beyond repair—at least you’ll know for sure. At least you tried. And you can always come back here and lick your wounds again.”

Ben chokes out a laugh. “That’s—thanks, Dad, that’s very reassuring.”

“Ben. You won’t know unless you try.” Han meets his eyes, and it’s just like when Ben was a kid. His dad could always make all the terrible, difficult things in life seem so much more simple than they felt.

And sometimes, when Ben let himself believe it, they were.

“So try,” he says.

It takes him a moment, but Ben manages a small smile. He rolls his eyes up and keeps them on the ceiling fan. “Okay.”

His father’s voice is excited, pleased. “Okay?”

“Okay. I will.”

Han grins, and Ben sees a glimmer of that roguish smile that his mother used to say made her fall in love. “Good,” he says brightly. “Now. Are you ready for what I'm going to say?”

It takes Ben a moment before he realizes. He rolls his shoulders back, as if preparing for a fight, and sighs with the kind of exasperation a son can muster only for his father. “Lay it on me, old man.”

Han’s expression is far too smug for Ben's liking.

“I told you so.”

Eventually, Ben figures out the speaker. It takes him thirty minutes, three help websites, and countless hissed curses, but he figures it out. Patches it up. Puts it back in the entertainment hutch.

Han watches as he busies himself, slowly, in the kitchen, putting together two BLTs for lunch.

“There,” Ben says finally, dusting off his hands and hissing at the little bruise that's forming over his palm where he accidentally clipped himself with pliers, “that should be fine for now.”

His father glances up, open excitement apparent on his face. Probably thrilled he can play all the Pixies he wants. “It's fixed?”

“Well, not really.” Ben cocks his head, considering the unit. It looks fine, sure, but he knows it's basically being held together by some yarn and chewing gum with the way he put it back together. “Kind of.”

“ _Kind of_?”

Ben pauses, considering it. “I mean it's a stop-gap measure. You'll probably want to take it somewhere and get it fixed by someone who actually knows what they're doing.”

Han waves the sentence off, seemingly unreceptive to the idea of having to take it to a professional. But it's fine. Ben knows he'll go. “Sure, sure.” Han jerks his head, gesturing to the kitchen. “Come eat something, kid. You're probably starving.”

And Ben is. So he goes to the kitchen and sits at the counter, eating a cold sandwich, feeling very much like he's back in high school again every time he feigns irritation at one of his dad's terrible jokes.

But, really, it's not so bad.

He should go through his old things, Han tells him after they eat lunch. 

“You know your mother,” he says, melodramatic in his minor complaint. “Saves _everything_.”

Based on the fact that she still hasn’t donated his old clothes, Ben is inclined to agree.

His mother’s tendency to hoard used to annoy Ben more. She’s meticulous about organization, naturally, but he was always confused by her tendency to confuse regular possessions for sentimental objects. Surely his old lacrosse gear and GameBoy don’t warrant a continued presence in the house, he thought.

Now, while he stills finds it bewildering, he understands better her desire to hold on. Maybe that counts as growth.

He ends up mostly just lingering on the floor by his desk, tugging unopened bottles of ink out of the drawers, searching for his calligraphy pen to see if they still work.

He’s distracted like that, scrawling his signature inside a notebook from his high school physics class, and doesn’t hear his mother’s approach until she’s standing beside him.

“Ben.”

He glances up. Sheepishly covers the page with one big hand, the letter R in sweeping lines. He didn’t write her a _love letter_ or anything. Not even her whole name. 

Still.

“Hey,” he says quietly.

Leia smiles warmly, setting her various Neiman Marcus bags beside her as she takes a seat on his bed.

Ben rolls to his feet and joins her, leaning back against the headboard. She pulls out a light blue collared shirt and holds it up to his chest.

“Don't you think you'd look sweet in this?”

He resists the urge to roll his eyes and whine _Mom_ , the way he did whenever she called him handsome any time after the fourth grade. “I'm sure it'll be just dashing,” he says, gently biting, but he takes the button-down from her anyway.

He puts the shirt on over his white tee, knowing she'll expect him to try everything on right away. While he fumbles with the buttons, Leia pulls out the rest of her haul: black pants, a leather belt, a cable knit cashmere sweater that he'll get very little use out of in sunny California. Neat leather shoes, earth-tone socks. Another button down, this one gingham; another pair of pants, gray. And she's not even done.

“Jesus, Mom,” he says, amused, as she pulls out yet another pair of socks. “Did you leave anything in the store?”

“Not even the curtains,” she says, with a wry tilt to her mouth. Her voice is lower, raspier now than it was when he was a kid, but even with the change she still sounds so much like herself. Like his mother. She dusts some invisible lint from his sweatpants and frowns. “Now go get dressed, and then we're going to talk.”

So he does.

When he comes back from his bathroom, wearing the black pants and fiddling with the cuffs, trying to roll the sleeves to the elbow, she's still sitting serenely on his old black comforter, layered overtop his old black bedsheets—embarrassing remnants of his goth phase. At the time, she tried to talk him out of the all black— _why not navy blue?_ —but he'd insisted.

Leia, unsurprisingly, doesn't beat around the bush at all.

“Your father tells me you two got a chance to talk.”

Ben glances up, fingers stilling on the fabric. He lets out his breath and takes a seat next to her.

“Yeah,” he says, “for a little bit.”

Her gaze is steady, without judgement. Just—sympathy. Like all those years ago. But it doesn't feel quite as bad now as it did then. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Even her words, he realizes, spark an old memory in him. A phantom ache in his knuckles, in a nose that isn't bloodied.

He doesn't know how much he can stand to repeat. “How much did Dad tell you?”

“He filled me in,” she says vaguely. “He said you've been keeping this secret for a while. But then, you always were a stubborn one.”

Ben puffs out a breath of laughter. “I've heard.”

“So.” Leia leans in and fixes his collar, where it wasn't laying quite right. When she straightens back up, he can see the corners of her mouth are slanted. “Rey Jackson, huh? Can't say I'm surprised.” Ben groans, but it only serves to amuse her more. “Oh, come on, Ben. You weren't exactly the most subtle about your little crush.”

“That's the second time I've heard that just today, is this a commonly known thing? Do you and Dad and Poe just hold meetings about this?”

Leia laughs, full and warm. “Hush. Of course not. We just _know_ you.”

Ben's eyes flicker and lower. His hand curls around the edge of a pair of argyle socks. “So you know I screwed things up.”

She shrugs. “Not forever.”

“Maybe forever.” He can't even help it, how lame he sounds. He squints at the sun streaming in through the window, wishing it were raining to match his mood, just like a melodramatic teenager would. But it isn't. It's a beautiful fucking day. “Probably forever.”

She tuts. “Now why do you say that?”

“Because it's—because I couldn't— _do_ anything. _Say_ anything, admit to _anything_.” Not when it counted anyway, even though he had every opportunity in the world. The worst fucking sense of timing. “Who would want to put up with that? Put up with—with _me_?”

His mother sighs, and the sound almost comforting in just how familiar it is. “Benji.”

“Rey deserves better than me.” He rubs the heel of his palm against his eye and takes a sharp breath. His hands jerk back to his shirtsleeves, wrestling them into place at his elbows. His words are acrid on his tongue, bitter. “She's going to figure it out if she hasn't already.”

“And what makes you say _that_?”

“Mom, I'm—I have always been a mess. Ever since I was a kid.” He feels strange, words pouring out of him. Spilling his guts, as it were. “I've always been like this, I'm—I'm selfish and unsympathetic and thoughtless and emotional and demanding and—”

“Stop.” Ben shuts his mouth out of sheer instinct, reacting to her stern tone automatically. His mother glares at him, her voice firm and unwavering. “Don't talk about my son like that. Ever.”

But he can't help it. “It's true. It’s always been like this, it’s like I’m—predisposed—”

“No. You aren’t,” she says. “You’re not any of those things.” Leia pauses for a long moment. Smiles a little, soft and understanding. “Well. Maybe a little bit emotional. And a little bit demanding.”

He scoffs. “Thanks, that makes me feel a lot better.”

Suddenly, his mom is serious again. Her voice drops low and soft and so, so gentle. “Ben, you aren’t him.”

For a moment, he pretends, like he doesn't know exactly what she's talking about. “I’m not who?”

“You aren’t your grandfather, Ben.” She stares at him as if daring him to contradict her, as if she can and will tear him to shreds the second he tries. Exactly the way she looked at him sometimes when he was a kid. Her head shakes, slow and deliberate. “And I’m sorry that I ever did anything to make you believe you were like him.”

His tongue feels thick in his mouth, his throat raw and scratchy. He remembers his mother fretting over his tantrums, a gleam of what he thought was fear in her expression, his uncle eyeing him in his office like Ben was already a criminal, _adults get jail time_ , Mr. San Tekka telling Leia in hushed tones _sometimes Ben is just so much like his grandfather—_ “But—”

She gives him no chance to protest. “The things you did at seventeen don’t define who you are now. Getting into a fight because some kids were picking on you doesn’t make you a bad person. And being a difficult child doesn’t make you an terrible adult.”

He feels strangely weakened. All his careful defenses falling by the wayside. “It’s not just that,” he protests. “I couldn’t—I can’t—even if she gives me another chance, I know I’ll do something to fuck it up again, and I’ll just keep trying and failing, and it’ll never end, like—like—”

He can't even continue. His eyes smart, tears pricking at the corners. Ridiculous, how often he's cried today. That ridiculous cliche of emotions going haywire, feeling like he's on a rollercoaster, all the most trivial lines in romance movies. Apparently being in love makes him a fucking mess.

His mother knows what he means anyway.

“Like me and your father?” She doesn't wait for him to nod. Doesn't need to. She sighs again, heavy, and reaches for his hand, taking his palm between hers. “You don’t need to punish yourself for our mistakes. Or isolate yourself out of some misguided fear of making the same ones that we did. Your life is your own.”

He speaks in barely a whisper, unable to muster anything more than that to admit it, out loud, finally. “I’m—scared.” Saliva chokes in his throat. “Terrified.”

She pats his hand once, understanding. Just like she always was, even when he didn’t want her to be. “I know. So is everybody else.”

He chuckles, watery, and swipes a hand over his eyes. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Does it?”

He shrugs. Smiles wanly. “Maybe.”

Leia brushes a lock of hair away from his face, brushing her knuckles across his forehead like she might be checking his temperature. Like she might just be getting him ready for school. “Do you know what you’re going to do?”

He nods slowly, the movement still uncertain. “Try, I guess.”

She's shaking her head before he even finishes speaking. “No. No _I guess_. No more hedging your bets. Make the effort. Let go of the embarrassment.” Leia peers at him over the tops of her glasses. “Now. Let me ask again. What are you going to do?”

He eats dinner at home. His dad orders a pizza, and they sit around the table together.

Han cracks wise, like some parody of a fast-talking journalist from old screwball comedies. Leia pretends to be annoyed, but she plays into every single joke. And Ben sits there between them and grins at the show.

It feels like it used to, during their best times. For a long time, when his parents acted like this around him, Ben felt like they were putting on a performance, rubbing in his face how newly happy they were without him there.

But they aren’t. They just like each other.

It feels nice. To be there. To be part of it again.

They say goodbye to him at the door, his arms laden with shopping bags full of clothes and his old calligraphy supplies. His father claps him on the back firmly. His mother tugs him down into a somewhat awkward height-mismatched hug. 

“You’re my favorite person in the world,” Leia whispers into his ear. She pats the side of his face fondly and grins as she pulls away. “Don’t tell your father.”

“I heard that,” Han complains.

Ben walks through the Birds of Paradise lining the front lawn, feeling strangely lighter. Freer. Oddly buoyant.

Nothing has changed since this morning, sure. But it’s okay. He has a plan.

He's going to tell her how he feels. And say what he wants. And ask if they can try again. And maybe she’ll understand.

Maybe she'll even feel the same way.

Ben gets into his car. He starts it up. Drives to the only place he wants to go.

He doesn’t even hesitate.

For the first time in a long time, Ben lets himself hope for the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I stretch my bones out on the floor. I think I'll really do the change.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3_9FSfpADA)


	31. love is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another moodboard! ari made a beautiful one [here!!!](https://twitter.com/reylocaltrash/status/1295792638403031040?s=20)
> 
> the LAST CHAPTER (not including epilogue) of this WHOLE FIC LIKE WOAH!!!!! i can't believe this fic is like. basically over. thank u everyone who read and commented and kudos'd and was just here. this is the longest thing i've ever written sustained over the longest period of time and i am a lil emotional about it ending. so thank u all. love love love to every one of u (YOU)!!
> 
> hope you guys enjoy and find this ending somewhat satisfying!!!!

** 31. love is **

Finn is not happy with him.

It’s not like Ben doesn’t understand it. He’s sure that if he were in the other man’s position, he wouldn’t be too pleased with himself either—not that he’s pleased with himself right now anyway.

But he needs Finn to be on his side if he’s going to do it what he came here to do.

“Please,” Ben says, pouring every ounce of sincerity he possesses into his words, all the love he feels for Rey, all the desperation he has to just _see_ her infused in every syllable, “I just need to talk to her.”

Finn doesn’t even pretend to consider it. “No.”

Ben groans.

On the drive to Rey's apartment, he went over what he thought was every single possibility of what might happen when he arrived at her front door, unannounced, with his metaphorical hat in his hands. He drove entirely on autopilot; he’s probably lucky he didn’t crash, distracted as he was. At every stoplight, he pictured her face. Through every curve on the freeway, thought of her expression earlier in the day. How her voice sounded when she spat out the words _no one_.

So concerned was he with imagining Rey's potential reactions—bursting into hysterical sobs (unlikely), blowing a fuse and screaming in his face (much more probable), throwing herself into his arms and showering him with love (highly fantastical and extremely far-fetched)—that he completely forgot to account for the fact of her roommate.

Her roommate, who loves Rey like a sister. Her roommate, who has already warned Ben against hurting her—which Ben did, less than nine hours ago.

Her roommate, who is now standing in the door to his apartment, glaring at Ben like if he tries hard enough, his looks may actually be able to kill. Or at least maim. At minimum, greatly inconvenience.

“Finn. I know I fucked up—”

The other man snorts. “Yeah, that's the understatement of the year.”

“—but I need to see her,” Ben continues somewhat valiantly, trying to seem more confident than he feels. This all seemed so much less terrifying on the drive over; he almost started to think he might have simply imagined all the paralyzing fears that kept him from realizing the immutable fact of his love for her sooner.

Obviously, that was nothing more than wishful thinking.

Ben is fucking _petrified_.

His lips churn. He shifts on his feet, grimacing at his own fucking idiocy.

“I need to make it right.”

Finn folds his arms across his chest, the universal stance of _I don’t buy a word you’re saying._ “Solo, you're going to need a lot more than a pout and a half-assed apology to peddle whatever bullshit you’re trying to...” He pauses, frowning at the lackluster ending to his sentence. “Peddle.”

Ben sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. It's not like he thought this would be easy, but—

Okay, maybe he kind of thought this would be easy. After all, love is supposed to conquer all, is it not? The thought of him being stopped—or at least delayed—by something as simple as a roommate not letting him into Rey’s apartment seems almost humiliating after the kind of day he's had. “Can you at least tell her I'm here? Please.”

The other man squints. He swipes a finger across his nose and cocks his head as if in deep, concentrated thought. For an uncomfortable amount of time, he just—stares at Ben. As if _assessing_ him. “Can I ask you an honest question?” he asks eventually.

Ben nods quickly, almost too much so, overly eager to provide any answer that will earn Finn's momentary trust, his approval. “Of course.”

“Why are you trying so hard, man?” Finn asks the question plainly, without pretense. Like he's really, genuinely curious. Ben wonders how truly apathetic he must seem to Finn if that's his major point of confusion: why Ben would even deign to do something as proletarian as _trying_. “Are you really that desperate to keep her on the hook? Scared you're going to lose a good lay? Because I gotta be honest, that's pretty fucked up—”

“What?” Ben chokes out, shaking his head. “No. _No_ , that's not it at all. Not even _close_.” His brow furrows, mouth turning down as he considers Finn. “What exactly did she say?”

“That's none of your business,” Finn bites out. Then, after a moment, he shrugs, arms unfolding, one hand settling on his hip. “She didn't say much. You know she's stubborn.”

A hint of a smile tugs at the corners of Ben's mouth. _Rey?_ he almost wants to say. _Stubborn? Never._ “Yeah, I do.”

Finn looks at him steadily. His expression is flat, serious. “Ben,” he says, calm, maybe even calmer than he should be, all things considered, “you being here is only going to hurt her. She would never admit to it out loud, but I think she really got her hopes up, and for you to just string her along like that—”

“But I didn't,” Ben protests. “I didn’t. Or—” He resists the urge to gnaw on his fingernails like an overgrown child, nervous in front of the teacher. “I didn't _mean_ to.”

“But you _did_.” Finn squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again. Lifts his face up for a long moment, as if avoiding Ben’s gaze. “Listen,” he says, finally lowering his eyes back to Ben’s. “I know she'd hate me for being so protective. But Rey is my best friend. And I'm not going to put her in this position if I can help it. She shouldn't have to be strong all the time. I can tell she's hurting a lot more than she's letting on.”

For a moment, they’re both quiet. It’s a strange thing for Ben to realize that they’re both thinking of Rey. That they both love her, in their own ways.

If he can just get Finn to recognize that, too.

Ben takes a small step forward, beseeching. “So am I.”

Finn rolls his eyes, throwing up a wall again. “Yeah. Right.” A sharp bark of laughter bursts from his mouth, and he shakes his head. “You know, I really don't get it,” he challenges. “Why would you want to come here? Is it that hard for you find someone else? Someone who doesn't care about being in a real relationship?”

The accusation stings. Ben knows he deserves the skepticism. Has more than earned it, time and time again. He still doesn’t know everything about what Rey told her friend, but he’s sure it couldn’t have painted his intentions in the best light.

_He told me he didn’t want a girlfriend. That he resents his parents. Never asked me to go to dinner or a movie, or anywhere where we might run into other people. Never asked me to stay the night. Never set foot in my bedroom._

All of it true.

But: hopefully not for much longer.

And, just like that, Ben knows what he has to do.

“You _knew_ that's what Rey wanted,” Finn goes on, voice dipping into something resembling incredulity, “and I just don't understand why you'd start things with her if you didn’t—”

Ben cuts him off. “Because I fell in love with her.”

It pulls Finn up short completely, the end of his rant trailing into nothing.

“I love her,” Ben says, quiet, letting his sincerity pour into the words. Letting go of it: the humiliating, open vulnerability of the thing. Uncomfortably human. “And if she doesn't want to see me, that's fine. I'll go. But—please. Just tell her I'm here.”

Finn looks at him. For a beat, Ben wonders if he might still turn him away.

But the other man must see something in his face, because instead of telling him to leave once and for all, he sighs instead, rubs his palm over his mouth, and, finally, nods.

All the tension Ben felt from the moment Finn opened the door melts away.

And is immediately replaced with a completely different kind of tension.

“Alright,” Finn says heavily. “I’ll ask her. Just—give me a minute.”

“Okay,” Ben breaths, hardly daring to believe it. His heart is beating so hard and so fast that he wonders, with a curl of self-consciousness, if maybe the other man is able to hear it. “Okay. Thank you, Finn.”

Finn lifts his hand just before he turns to leave. “Don’t thank me,” he says. “Seriously. I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this for Rey.”

A self-deprecating smile tugs at the corners of Ben’s lips. “I know.”

The three minutes that follow Finn walking back into the apartment, leaving the door slightly ajar, are the longest of Ben’s entire life.

He could, he supposes, wait in the living room. But he finds he’s unable to move a single muscle to open the door and walk inside.

He would like to say that he spends those minutes thinking about useful things, like what he’ll say if Rey agrees to talk to him, or what he’ll do if she refuses, or how awkward school will be if she does see him and says something along the lines of _oh, honey, not in a million years_.

But in reality, Ben spends those three minutes thinking about absolutely nothing at all. If only that meditation teacher on that “definitely not mandatory” firm-wide retreat six years ago could see him now.

Before he can so much as plan a single sentence, Finn returns, an inscrutable expression settled on his features as he pulls the door open wide again.

Ben inhales, about to confirm the worst, when Finn interrupts him before he can begin.

“She’s in her room,” he says, jerking his head back in that general direction.

Ben swears he can feel his heart stop. “She wants to see me?”

“She said, and keep in mind, I’m giving you a direct quote here, ‘I’m whatever about it.’”

It should probably be humiliating, how thrilled those four words make him.

Finn, as if sensing Ben’s inexplicable inability to open up the door himself, steps aside to let Ben through.

They are instantly greeted by the sight of Rose, standing in the middle of the living room, beside the overladen coffee table. She glares at Ben with a look of pure death.

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even need to. She just _looks_.

A chill goes up his spine. He thinks it might be some lingering instinct leftover from harsher, more carnivorous times. A realization that someone more dangerous than him has just appeared.

Rose points to both of her eyes, and then to Ben’s, not needing to say aloud what they both know she’s thinking: _I’m watching you_.

Finn might have given him the classic _if you hurt my best friend_ speech already, but Rose conveys a similar sentiment without a single word passed between them.

Ben waves meekly.

Too quickly, his feet carry him to the hallway opposite the kitchenette, to Rey’s door. In front of him, on the wood, is a decal with the words _BEWARE OF CAT_ written in big block letters, a black silhouette of a cat with a knife underneath. It startles a grin out of him. Behind him, he can hear Rose and Finn muttering to each other, their words too quiet to make out.

Ben takes a deep breath. Turns the handle of the door. Pushes it until it clicks open.

He steps inside.

The first thing he sees is Rey. She’s—the only thing, really, for a few seconds. It’s like the rest of the world...blurs. Becomes nothing but colors and shapes, like a newborn baby fumbling into awareness.

When he manages to catch his breath, he notices things here and there, bursts of information trickling into his consciousness in fits and starts: a poster of a band he’s never heard of on the wall, a horrifically ugly argyle sweater he’s never seen her wear hanging in her closet, the curtains draped across the window the exact color of marshmallow Peeps, a collection of Mary Oliver poems on her nightstand, something he’s ordinarily make caustic, vicious fun of were it any other situation. Were she anybody else.

There’s other things, too—the way none of the furniture matches. How the hamper is overflowing with aprons. Baby, purring on her pillow, his body stretched out like he owns the place. Christmas lights strung up over her bed, the multicolor kind, making it seem less like a stylistic choice and more like a decoration she had just never put away. The sight of the moon in the window, a waning crescent. Or waxing, maybe—how the fuck would he know.

She’s sitting on her bed, on a yellow comforter, wearing gray shorts and a white shirt. It’s the plainest clothing he’s ever seen her in. Six months ago, he probably would have convinced himself he was grateful for her toning her apparel down. Now, it just makes his heart crack in his chest, fragile and wobbling as an egg crushed in the pudgy, clumsy fist of a child.

Her hair is combed and neat, parted down the middle, waving over her shoulders, and her face is dry and clear. She may be slightly paler than usual, but, for the most part, she seems blithely unaffected by his presence in her bedroom.

“Hi.” His voice splits on the single syllable. He flinches.

Rey stares at him, arms folded over her chest, one socked foot tapping an indeterminate rhythm on the floor. He glances down, desperate to drink as much of her in as possible, like it’s the last time he’ll see her.

Though the rest of her outfit is plain as can be, there are little smiley faces on the toes of the socks. They make him grin, despite himself.

“Nice socks,” he murmurs.

She cocks her head slightly. Doesn’t react otherwise.

Ben clears his throat. “So.” He shifts, uncomfortable. He launches into it clumsily, starting out with a severe understatement. “This morning happened.”

Still nothing. On the pillow, Baby Driver stretches, arching his back and pawing at the bed, his claw audibly tearing up the comforter’s fabric.

Ben forges ahead, determined.

“I didn’t mean to tell you like that. I don’t know if I meant to tell you at all, to be honest. I don’t think I even really knew until I—yelled it. At you. Jesus, this is—embarrassing, are you going to talk or?” The last question is tacked on breathlessly. His hand waves in the air at nothing at all.

Rey just sits, undisturbed as ever. She drums the fingers of her right hand on the opposite arm as if to say _I’m waiting._

“That’s fine,” he says, willing himself to be calm. This is fine. He can definitely handle this. “I’ll start, I guess.”

She sits, looking for all the world like she's waiting for something. He might be trying to convince himself of this, that she cares about what he's going to say to her, this speech he’s starting to realize he probably should have planned.

He huffs out a sound that might be a laugh. “Maybe I don't know how to start,” he admits, more to himself than her. “I haven't done this before. You know, this being—um. A...sort of confession. Of love. As it were.”

Rey blinks, slow. _Kitty kisses_ , she called that once, when Baby did the same thing as he fell asleep on top of the fridge. A sign of trust, closing your eyes in front of someone else.

A rueful grin spreads across his face.

“You don't believe me, huh?” He shrugs. Shuffles to her dresser, glancing over the photos she has clustered together in macaroni and glitter decorated frames, likely gifts from former students: Rey and Finn screaming in the third row on a toboggan at Disneyland on Splash Mountain; Rose sitting in the swings on the school’s playground, holding her hand out to shield her face from the camera; Baby as a kitten, curled up in Rey’s arms. Ben resists the urge to touch the pictures and tucks his hands into his pockets instead. “I get it. We aren't even dating. Weren't even dating,” he corrects himself. “Since, you know. You broke it off. But here I am. Confessing.”

Rey clenches her jaw. Her foot shakes, jarring the bed.

She doesn’t speak.

Ben sighs, squeezing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, not quite sure about how to go on with the notable lack of audience participation. “Are you going to talk to me at all?”

Rey jerks her chin up, away from him, an obvious response. Ben frowns. He should go. She’s giving him her answer, and he should probably cut his losses and go and—

“You know, if you weren't happy about the way things were going, you always could have told me,” he says. “Communication is a two-way street. If you wanted me to—if you wanted to know where we stood, you could have _asked_ me. Or said something. Or told me earlier what you wanted. It's not all on me, you know.”

Rey doesn't move. He scrubs a hand over his face and sighs again, deeper.

“Yeah, I don't buy that either,” he mutters. “I already knew what you wanted. Was just too chickenshit to admit it out loud. Or confront it directly.”

He eyes her. Rey hasn’t shifted position since he entered the room, sitting upright on the edge of the bed. He moves away from the dresser, closer to her. “Maybe that’s why you're not saying anything,” he muses. “Just letting me talk myself into a corner. It's a good technique, I’ll say that much. I used to do this with clients sometimes, when I thought they weren't telling me the whole truth.

“So I guess you think I'm going to say something contradictory. Maybe I’ll reveal that I came here for villainous purposes. Disappoint you. You're used to that, right? People disappointing you?”

Her chin juts out further, her eyes lowered to the floor. So defiant of everything, so stubborn.

He edges closer, step by agonizing step, until he’s right there in front of her. It’s an awkward angle for conversation, standing up while she’s sitting down, so he bends, slowly dropping to the ground.

He waits there, on one knee in front of her, until she finally meets his eyes again. Her expression isn’t so blank anymore, her features gentled just barely, hazel eyes bright and wet, red and blue and green lights twinkling over her hair.

“But I’m not going to disappoint you,” he says. Promises. “Not anymore.”

Ben thinks of a time when he was a child, holding a classmate’s pet rabbit in his hands during show-and-tell. The softness of its fur, the thin cage of its ribs, the wild, animal beating of its tiny heart. He feels a little like that rabbit. Or maybe: like he’s a child again, carrying something precious and alive in his hands. His palm drifts, rests on one of Rey’s knobby knees, and he can feel her whole body quaking. “I've spent all day trying to...pinpoint when it happened, when I fell in love, and I can't quite figure it out. I think maybe it was that day on the beach. You had sand in your hair, and you drooled in your sleep, and I remember thinking I could spend every single day looking at you, talking to you, being with you, and I'd be happy. I _was_ happy. Maybe that doesn't sound impressive to you, but I've spent my whole life not really knowing what that is or how to get it, and you just stumbled into my place of work and suddenly—I was. It couldn't have been any later than that day, not even a single second later. How embarrassing, right? We'd only slept together once, and I was already so— _gone_ for you.” He traces a line over her skin with his thumb. Feels her shiver. “So maybe it was then.”

Ben pauses for a moment. It could have been earlier, he thinks. Maybe the first day they met, surrounded by those toddlers. How he already wanted to sink his teeth into her, how he thought of her more often than he ever wanted to admit. Ben doesn’t believe in love at first sight, but he didn't really believe in love at all before Rey anyway, so. Who knows.

It could've been the first day they met.

“I know you heard me say you’re nobody. I’m sorry. I’d say I don’t know why I said it, but that wouldn’t be true. I was just scared. Because you’re not nobody. You’re not nothing. You’re—you’re _everything_.” He hears her breath hitch, and his fingers flex, spread open wider on her leg. Rey’s eyes flutter, flickering to meet his gaze and then away again. Ben presses on, “You said you want a fucking boyfriend— _I_ can be that. _I_ can be your fucking boyfriend.”

He turns his head, trying to meet her eyes, but she only shakes her head, lower lip quivering. “I don't think you would have let me in here if you didn't want that, too,” he says. “At least a little bit.”

Under his hand, he can feel her trembling, ever-so-slightly. Her fingers, gripping the edge of the mattress, tighten in her comforter.

“Rey, I want to be with you. I want to go on dates and introduce you to people at parties and say _this is my girlfriend Rey, she’s an art teacher_ , and ask you things like _are we staying over at your place or mine_ _tonight_. I want to be with you so much that sometimes we have to be in different rooms because we’re sick of each other. Even if I don’t think I could ever get sick of you.” He's breathless, almost undone, shaking into pieces; if he doesn't tell her now, he thinks, he'll never get it out. “I want to be with you because you’re fucking smart and good and beautiful and—and you look like you got dressed in the dark.”

Some choking sound that’s almost a laugh escapes her mouth. A grin pulls at the corners of Ben's lips, his voice dipping into playful sternness. “Don’t laugh. I mean, that Santa Claus dress you were wearing when we first kissed was a monstrosity. I probably had nightmares.” Another sound leaves her, this one closer to a giggle. He thinks there might be water pooling in the corners of her eyes. “And you’re not afraid to fight back when I’m being an idiot, even from the first day we met. And you... _collect_ things and keep them safe. You're like a bird putting tinsel in its nest, and—and you love the color yellow, and I’m absolutely positive that you really took to heart that Mary Oliver quote about _living your one wild and precious life_ , and it’s all so fucking...beautiful.” He smiles. Can't help it really. Not with the way she's looking at him, her expression softening, bit by bit, like ice melting. “You’re beautiful.”

His hand on her knee shifts, reaching for her palms clasped between her legs, tracing over the knuckles of her fingers. His voice is quiet, barely audible even to his own ears. But he knows she's listening. “Rey, I love you. I really love you. Please. Just—give me a chance to show you.”

Her mouth opens noiselessly. Shuts again. Her head shakes, almost imperceptible, eyes dropping again.

Ben edges closer, bending his head so that he can see her face. There's a note of something like desperation in his voice when he says, “Rey, please talk to me.”

And she doesn't.

Ben gives her a moment. And then another. And another. Until finally, he knows it's over.

At least, he thinks, maybe a little bitterly, he tried his best. It's more than he's ever done before.

“Okay.” He nods firmly, trying to sound more neutral than he feels, unaffected and casual, even though he can feel his heart and every other lesser organ attempting to crawl out of his body through his throat. He gave it his best shot, right? Left it all out on the field, like his dad would say. He had one chance, and it's her decision not to give him another, and he understands, and it's okay. It's probably what's best for her, after all. “Okay. I’m gonna go. Thank you. For listening. For letting me in for a little while. It was—perfect.” He grins, rueful, and gets to his feet, fingers still gripping hers. He squeezes her hand, a good-bye. “I’ll see you around.”

Ben turns, not ready to leave, knowing he has to, and he doesn't even make it a step before he's abruptly stopped.

By Rey. Her hand still curved into his.

She looks up at him, her eyes glimmering in the soft light of her beside lamp.

“How did you know it was yellow?” Her voice is quiet, full of feeling, utterly artless. Ben furrows his brow, his heartbeat quick as a rabbit in his chest.

“What?” he manages.

“My favorite color,” she explains, sounding almost impatient with him, like he's being deliberately slow on the uptake. “I don’t think I ever told you that. How did you know it was yellow?”

The divot between his eyebrows etches deeper in confusion. “Because of course it is,” he says stupidly. “You surround yourself with it. I knew it because of the table, but seeing the curtains and the bed just makes it much more obvious.”

Rey stands, rising until she's right there, right in front of him. Close enough to touch. To press his body into hers. It takes all of his self-control not to do just that. 

“You know, I never liked yellow,” he goes on, babbling now, because he's _here_ and she's _here_ and she's talking to him again and there's a look in her eyes that makes him think maybe, _maybe_. “It’s so— _bright_. And juvenile. So horribly, unavoidably cheerful and sunny. It’s a color for children,” he adds, because he's an idiot and apparently his idiot brain can't resist one last attempt at self-sabotage.

But she doesn't seem angry, or even upset. Her face is open, pinpricks of tears shining on her lashes, glistening in the light.

“Ben,” she says, and he gasps, sighs, he can't think of what to call it. He's a mess of a person, absolutely destroyed by the cool press of her palm to his cheek.

“Now, every time I see anything yellow I think of you,” he murmurs, voice a wreck. He doesn't know how they got so close, but all of a sudden they are, his nose bumping against her forehead, eyes drifting shut, a hush falling over both of them like snow. “Cars on the street. Flowers. Sand. The fucking _sun_. You _ruined_ me. You really fucking ruined _—_ ”

He's not totally sure where his sentence is going before it's unceremoniously sliced in half. Rey is barely audible, voice cracked as she says his name again, “ _Ben_ ,” and her jaw brushes against his, feather-light. She sounds different, maybe some kind of happy-sadness, or sad-happiness, and they're so close he can hardly even think. He just wants—he _wants_ —

And then she's turning, kissing him, pressing her body against his like a postage stamp, or like water pushing against the walls of a dam, and he's done fucking around with metaphors because she's _kissing_ him, and he's kissing her back, and both of them are sort of embarrassingly aggressive about it, mouths biting, teeth knocking, arms tight as vices around each other like neither of them can get close enough. It feels familiar, a little bit like their first kiss—or maybe it was the second one, technically speaking, since they took a break after the first to argue and claim they hated each other and wow, he is really the dumbest man alive, how did he not realize this sooner? Doesn't matter. He kisses the taste of sugar off her tongue, over-sweet, like she was just eating powdered donuts. Which, really, he wouldn't be surprised if she was.

By the time they surface for air, one of Ben's hands tangled in her loose hair, the other tucked up the back of her shirt and stroking the smooth skin of her back, Rey is shaking like a leaf in his arms, her eyes damp with tears shed and unshed. But she's smiling a little wildly at him, happy and eyes filled with something he thinks could be love.

“I love you,” he gasps out, and shakes his head as she inhales, clearly about to tell him she isn't ready yet. And it's _fine_ —this time he isn't even lying to himself about that. He can wait, as long as she needs. “You don't need to say it back. Just—do you want to get dinner with me?”

Rey grins, huffing out a watery burst of laughter as she nods. “Dinner sounds good,” she says after a long moment, voice thick and unsteady, as if she hasn't spoken in a very long time. “I'm starving.”

His eyebrows jump. “Oh, you mean now?”

She nods, her smile slipping into something easier, more familiar. “Yes, now.”

“But I already ate.” Rey's lips twist, expression bright and mischievous, and she feigns a punch to his stomach that he gamely blocks with his hand. “I guess,” he sighs, put-upon, and laces their fingers together, “for you. I could.”

Her smile grows, taking up half her face. She's so fucking gorgeous it takes his breath away. Really, it's sickening, what a cliche he's become. He loves it. And her.

He is...so happy. He's really just beside himself with it.

How mortifying.

Rey briefly extricates herself from his embrace, wiping her wet face clean with the back of her hand, taking a deep, shuddering breath in. She casually toes on sandals over her socks, the most horrific thing he's ever seen her do clothing-wise. Ben honestly can't believe this is who he's fallen in love with; it's genuinely baffling. Whatever. Best thing he's ever done in his whole stupid life. Then, like she knows exactly what he's thinking, Rey grins up at him slyly, tucks her hand into his, and tugs him over to the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Won't you tell me what you're thinking of?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pte3Jg-2Ax4)


	32. we found a hat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **brief note: content warning for reylo kids** in the second to last section, "one year and six months." they're mentioned in passing, but just wanted to give everyone a heads up!
> 
> holy shit it's finally fucking over
> 
> thank you to literally everybody who made it this far (oh and thank you especially to [frak](https://twitter.com/AllFrak) for helping me nail down some ideas for how to structure this ending!!!)
> 
> thank you EVERYBODY for reading and kudosing and commenting and just being generally here. this is the most i've ever written for one project sustained over the longest time period, and i feel a little wistful letting it go, like it's a beautiful wild animal i nursed back to health, only with writing. i digress. i hope you enjoyed reading this! i know loved writing it.
> 
> i don't know how to end things, but hey, anyway. here is the ending!!

** epilogue: we found a hat **

** six days **

Ben has a girlfriend.

What a wild fucking sentence.

What a wild fucking year.

He knows he has a girlfriend because when he takes her to Chewie’s niece’s quinceñera, the Friday after the worst day of his life that somehow became the best day of his life, that’s what he calls her. Rey. His girlfriend.

He introduces her to just about everybody.

_This is Rey, my girlfriend. This is my girlfriend, Rey. Have you met Rey? My girlfriend? She’s an art teacher, and also the best person ever, probably. I’m in love with her. What a wild fucking year, right?_

In other circumstances, with another woman, Ben might be more reluctant to put a label on things so early. But not now. Not with Rey. Every time he says that word— _girlfriend_ —her cheeks flush pink and pleased, her mouth twitching in a clear attempt at hiding a grin.

The only thing better than Ben calling Rey his girlfriend is hearing what she calls him, to anyone who will listen.

_This is Ben. My boyfriend._

They had decided on it the day before. It was a much shorter conversation than Ben had anticipated—agonized over, for what feels like an absurd amount of time. Because if she's going to come with him to Chewie's niece's quinceñera, an event where Ben will somehow, inexplicably, faintly know every single person in attendance, then they should probably nail down exactly what he's going to introduce her as.

“You can just say I'm your girlfriend.” Rey shoveled a spoonful of Froot Loops into her mouth and cocked her head. The ancient teakettle she refused to let him replace whistled cheerily, shrieking until he pulled it off the burner. She shrugged, a blush painting her cheekbones pink as watermelon. “If you want.”

It's the habit they're in right now. _If you want_ -ing each other. It's better than not talking about it at all, he supposes. Early stages, Ben thinks. Baby steps.

“Yeah,” he said, and smiled crookedly. “I want.”

So that's what she is. It's how he refers to her to Chewie and various members of his various extended family and acquaintances that they're thrust into conversation with, to a random event hall employee who stumbles upon Rey and Ben in a compromising (but not entirely pornographic, thank fuck) position in the coat room, and to his parents, both of whom act like it's their first time meeting Rey ever, despite the fact that they both knew her long before he did.

“Well,” Leia says smugly, taking advantage of Rey and Han getting up for thirds at the buffet. “You and Ms. Jackson. I can't say I'm surprised.”

Ben frowns, puzzled. “Why would you be? You're the one I went to for advice.”

His mother waves her hand and grins, chuckling lowly. “No, I mean—I met that girl just about a year ago. Saw her artwork. Told her about the school. Somehow convinced her to move here.” Leia's lips curl into a private smile. “And she's incredible, of course, perfect fit for Alliance. One of those naturals.”

Ben lifts his eyebrows. “Yes? So?”

There's a dangerous glint in his mother's eyes that he knows all too well. “So,” she says, “the minute I saw you with her, I knew you'd be just perfect together.”

If he could roll his eyes any harder, he would. “No, you did not,” he bites out, but there's no real irritation in it. He can't muster it. Not with how fucking happy he is.

His mother only laughs again. “Maybe not right away,” she admits. “But sooner than you, I'm sure.”

Ben shakes his head, grinning a little to himself. Yeah. The entire world knew sooner than he did. Over at the buffet table, he can see Rey carefully piling a stack of flautas on her plate, tongue sticking out in concentration. Before he can look away, she glances up, catches his eye, and smiles in delight. “Yeah,” he says, not even bothering to give the appearance of paying attention, “I'm sure.”

It takes him a few seconds to remember where the conversation was about—or even who he was talking to—when his mother speaks again, tone overly casual and light.

“When's the wedding, Benji,” she says.

** one month and two days **

It's an accident, the first time she says it, in the main hallway of the building, where Rey turns left to go to the lower school and Ben turns right to go to the upper school. They carpooled together in the morning, the way that they have been some mornings (most mornings, really, if he’s being honest with himself, and Ben can't believe this gets to be his life). Even though he's spent the last twelve or so hours with Rey, he's still a little reluctant to part with her.

It's almost unfathomable, how much of a cliche he's become. The exact kind of lovestruck sap he always hated. Now, he knows exactly what he was missing out on.

 _Whipped_ , Poe had mocked him a week earlier. He crumpled up a spare sheet of paper and tossed it across Ben's office, missing the garbage can by a good three feet. “And I fucking knew you would be,” he said.

Ben just shrugged, typing out another email and carefully not smiling. “You did.”

“And to think, just a few months ago, you were too busy lying to yourself to see the truth.”

“Mhm.”

“And not a moment too soon.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Because Rose owes me fifty bucks.”

Ben's fingers stilled. “Wait, what?”

“I told her it wouldn't be official until after spring break.” At Ben's near horrified expression Poe just gave another shit-eating grin. “She doesn't know you as well as I do.”

Ben furrowed his brow and frowned. “Should I be offended that you've apparently been placing bets on my life?”

Poe thought about this for a moment. “Just this particular facet of it, but sure, if you want to be offended, go ahead.”

Ben considered this before he went back to typing. “Nah, I don't really care.”

Poe whistled low. “Wow,” he said. “You really are in love.”

A smile twitched at the corners of Ben's mouth. “Shut up.”

“That's really embarrassing for you.”

“Don't you have a wife and child to go bother?”

Poe’s eyebrows lifted, mouth curling in apparent delight as if he were just remembering them. “I do.” Ben scoffed, and Poe laughed, just like the little shit-stirrer he is. “Aw, Ben, don't worry. You’ll have that too someday.”

Ben's lips quirked at Poe's groan of anguish when he missed the trash again, but he otherwise didn't react.

Because, as strange and absurd as it was to think that way after three weeks of dating, he somehow knew he would.

Something that seemed so impossible a year ago—doesn't feel that way now. In fact, it seems...inevitable. Like something worth waiting for.

Because, he already decided, Rey is worth waiting for.

So terribly _cliche_. Whipped is right.

Holding onto her hand for as long as he can before she has to turn around and go to her classroom, Ben bites his tongue so he doesn't say the words that have been on the tip of it for a month. Because she isn't ready, and he doesn't want to put pressure on her, on what they have. He's turning around to walk to his office when Rey says the very thing he's been thinking for what feels like his entire life.

“See you later,” she says, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Love you.”

She walks away before he can catch his breath enough to respond.

He considers running after her and asking her to repeat herself, but decides after a moment that this may come across as mildly to moderately desperate.

Instead, Ben spends the rest of the day in a daze. When Poe asks him what’s wrong, he just grins.

“Oh, Jesus,” Poe teases later. “Look who’s just so in love.”

And Ben _is_ , so he can do nothing but grin wider.

By the time he can finally skip out on work and rush down to Rey’s classroom to drive her home—maybe they can get dinner, try that new Italian place they’ve been meaning to check out, or maybe they can just stay in and get takeout and watch _Bend It Like Beckham,_ a movie that Rey has been insisting he needs to see—he’s practically vibrating with restrained energy.

When he walks into her classroom, it’s to the sight of Rey hand-wringing.

Literally. Wringing her hands. Like a war widow.

Ben pauses, furrowing his brow as he takes in the sight of her. “Rey?”

“Was that okay?” she bursts out immediately. “Was it—I didn’t mean to say—”

The blood drains from his face. His stomach turns, and the absurd joy of the day seems to flit out of his grasp. “Oh. So you didn’t,” he croaks, clearing his throat a little, “mean it like—”

“What?” Rey’s hands fly out as she rushes forward a few steps, closer to him, close enough to touch. “No, Ben, honey, I meant it, of _course_ I meant it. I just—didn’t mean to say it like— _that_.”

The rush of relief he feels is staggering. Ben is honestly surprised he doesn’t pass out from it. “Like what?”

Rey chokes out a laugh. It sounds almost like crying. Like happy tears. That’s what his mother calls it. “Like a shout in the middle of a school hallway. And—I didn’t—” her eyes lower, looking down at her shoes (new ones, platform sandals with too many colors that she got from a secondhand store, just as tacky as the rest of her clothes; he was there when she found them), “I didn’t know if you—if you still wanted to tell me, or—or if maybe you wanted to slow down—”

His laughter is equally as strangled. He feels giddy. He hasn’t felt giddy since he was a child, maybe not ever, but he feels giddy now. “Rey, of course I love you,” he breathes. “I have for ages.”

It’s the first time he’s said it out loud in a month, and—and Rey is looking at him with so much happiness, with so much love that he feels almost out of his body, like he might float away or explode or something equally farfetched and ridiculous.

“I love you,” she gasps, and then her body is against his and he’s kissing her in her classroom for the third time ever.

Somehow, it’s even better than the first two.

Primarily because she doesn’t push him away after it’s over, which Ben personally thinks qualifies as a vast improvement.

**three months and one week and two days **

There’s nothing much to do during the summer. Ben supposes he could do what Poe does and find some part-time job. Tutoring, teaching a course at the local community college, retail—although he doubts he’d be any good at that particular line of work.

But Ben doesn’t. He spends his summer catching up on reading, and doing yard-work at his parents’ house because Han is too proud to admit he shouldn’t be putting in so much manual labor anymore, and staying up and waking up late.

He does Rey, too. Obviously.

She’s over at his place most nights. There’s a drawer in his dresser that belongs to her, space he’s made in his closet. A toothbrush next to his bathroom sink, her shoes next to his in the doorway. She brings him five dollar bouquets from the grocery store and tchotchkes from flea markets she frequents with Rose: a figurine of an orange cat playing with a ball of yarn, a picture frame with the words _LIVE LAUGH LOVE_ in cursive on the bottom (he finds it impossible to tell if it’s satirical on her part or not), an amateurish painting of the beach, a vintage Oscar the Grouch puppet that she got “for a steal!” (eight dollars haggled down from fifteen). She claims his apartment needs some livening up.

“It looks like a dentist’s office,” she says. “And not even a fun dentist with a toy bin.”

Which, he protests, is unfair. He never got any toys from the dentist. Neither did she, but she’s sure their offices look more habitable than his flat.

So the summer goes by, slow and lazy, with nothing to do but each other. Like a fucking dream.

On their way out of the apartment one morning, with Ben’s hair still wet from the shower, the kitchen smelling like the Mr. Coffee Rey insists tastes just as good as the Ethiopian blend he favors, she stops suddenly and announces she can’t find her wallet.

Ben paid for dinner the night before, she says, so she didn’t need it, so she didn’t realize until just now, and where could she have left it, and oh, holy shit, she’s going to be identity-thieved, and this is the end of her life as she knows it.

Ben is digging through the couch cushions and searching under the coffee table while Rey dumps out her purse on the kitchen island when—

“Oh,” she gasps suddenly, pressing her hand to her throat, “okay, it’s fine, I remember where it is.”

She was shopping on Etsy and needed her credit card, and she just forgot to put it back in her purse.

She laughs, relieved. She says, “Oh, thank god, I just left it at Finn’s.”

And then she freezes.

Ben’s eyes dart up to meet hers, his lips parted, curved in the beginning of a smile. In his chest, his heart feels like it might be bursting. Rey takes one look at his expression and points her finger in his face.

She says, “Don’t say a word.” 

His holds his hands up in surrender, trying to keep his smile tamped down.

Ben lets Rey, red as a tomato, hustle him out of the door without a word about her slip.

Her lease is up in October. Ben knows this. Rey told him about it in passing a few weeks ago, and he's thought of it every day since.

** six months and one week **

They’re breaking in the new apartment.

That’s how Rey decided to phrase it when she was pitching the idea.

The idea of them arriving late to the dinner party for their own housewarming to have sex.

Never mind the fact that it's not a new apartment at all: Rey is moving into his. Officially, this time, as in name on the lease. She'd been spending all her nights at his anyway, really, so the actual content of their living space isn’t changing so much as expanding. Beyond belief, too, because Rey refused to get rid of anything. She nestles her things alongside his and replaces others as she sees fit. His glass coffee table is ejected soundly, his books jarred out of their alphabetical order, his tasteful wall art now hanging alongside little kid drawings with captions like “MAN WTH SPIDRS BEIG EETN,” (presumably by the aforementioned spiders, although there’s very little in the illustration that appears to depict this). Ben has been passing these things, all this stuff, the content of Rey's life mixing with his, all of it evidenced in his home, _their_ home. Every time he does he feels a strange and pleasant twinge in his heart, like the dull and oddly reassuring throb of a sprain. Not even the man-being-eaten-alive-by-circle-spiders-with-far-too-many-stick-legs picture could make him feel anything other than love. This is how Ben knows just how in trouble he is at every single moment. He is...probably seconds away from proposing. Too soon, he knows. Six months is too soon, even if it doesn't feel like it. Even if he knows this is it for him, forever, world without end, and so on, and so forth.

Finn had insisted on co-hosting a semi-get-together-semi-party at Rose’s and his apartment, where he just finishing moving in the last of his boxes.

“Perfect timing,” Finn said with a grin when they told him the news—that Ben had asked Rey to move in, that she’d quite literally shrieked in reply, that it had taken him a good ten seconds to work out that her reaction meant she was excited and not horrified. “Me and Rose and you and Benjamin here.”

Rey smiled, and Finn directed his attention to Ben. “And look at you, Solo,” he said, grinning.

The rest of his sentence is unsaid, implied solely by the look in his eye. _Ben Solo: who would have thought?_ No one really. Least of all Ben.

And yet, here he is. Breaking in his new-old apartment. Running obscenely late for their own party.

“It’s fine,” Rey whispers hastily into his mouth, undoing the first few buttons on his shirt before giving up on the endeavor completely and working his belt through the loops of his slacks, “no one will even notice.”

They _will_ notice. Rey knows this. Ben knows this.

But he feels pretty okay with the idea as long as she keeps touching his cock. So. Fuck it.

Rey rides him on her overstuffed armchair, half-clothed, with the straps of her tank top tugged down just enough to bare her breasts to him. Her tits are warm in his mouth, nipples stiff and wet from his attentions. Ben is inside her, drawing out slowly, unhurriedly stuffing her full again, pretending they have all the time in the world even as the kitchen clock warns that they were supposed to have left ten minutes ago. He doesn't care, not with the way Rey whines on his lap, whimpering something about how it’s too much, it’s too intense, she’s going to burst into flames, even though she's taken all of it and more hundreds of times by now. Maybe not hundreds of times; Ben has no idea. Math was never a strong-suit.

She comes on his cock so sweetly, fluttering around him, his fingers on her clit, her lips just barely parted, and he loves her. He loves her. And Rey, slumping against his chest, letting him chase his own release inside her body, murmurs those three words to him again, like she'll never get tired of saying them. Just like he'll never tire of hearing her say it.

Ben says it too, when he finishes, the sound of it almost lost in her hair.

They end up getting there twenty minutes late. Finn just raises his eyebrows when he opens the door to their flushed, obvious expressions.

He says, faux-annoyed, “You _missed_ the _charcuterie_.”

Rey smiles and pats her friend's face as she passes. “I think we'll live,” she says, and walks into the living room ahead of both of them.

** one year and two weeks and four days **

Kyle is the one who lets Ben know exactly how obvious it's gotten at school.

“The whole fourth grade knows you're dating Ms. Jackson,” he tells Ben sternly. Kyle delivers the information the moment they leave Ms. Erso’s classroom, like it's of the utmost urgency, a life-and-death situation. “It's only a matter of time before the third grade catches on, too. And then it's the _fifth_ grade and the _sixth_ grade. And then you'll have a real disaster on your hands.”

Ben's mouth quirks, but otherwise he keeps his expression flat. “Why, exactly, do you think I'm dating her?” he challenges.

Kyle gives a withering glare that reminds Ben so much of himself it takes him a moment to recover. “Mr. Solo,” he says, with pitch-perfect derision, “it's like you think we're all _blind_ or something.”

Which, okay. Maybe the kid has a point. He and Rey both agreed that neither of them wanted to discuss their relationship with any of their students, but they haven't been doing all that much to hide it either. Last week, when he was lingering in front of Rey's door waiting to eat lunch with her, Tallie Lintra, walking by on some errand for her teacher, actually stopped to ask him, “What are you even _doing_ here, Mr. Solo? Don't you work in the high school?”

Rey had to firmly remind him that he didn't have the authority to give detention to children in the lower school (or maybe even at all; he still barely has an idea of how far his authority extends) before she defused Tallie with some sweet comment about her clay sculpture earlier that morning. Then, Ben and Rey ate lunch together in the lounge, and he kissed her before he went back up to his office. He figured that was the end of it.

Apparently not.

Ben pauses, realizing exactly what Kyle said. 

“What kind of disaster are you referring to, exactly?”

Kyle has the nerve to roll his eyes. Little pre-preteen fuck. Ben has never been prouder. “Do _you_ want everybody asking you and Ms. Jackson about dating each other?”

Ben's eyebrows tilt together as he frowns. “No, I guess not,” he mutters. “Actually, I'm not sure if I like talking to you about it, kid.”

Kyle shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you, man,” he says, and Ben snorts.

“Don’t get too comfortable with that particular form of address.”

“So do you, like. Like her?”

Ben looks down at his student as they walk side-by-side down the hall. He nods, matching Kyle’s seriousness with his own.

The kid’s eyes widen into round, dark circles. “Do you kiss her?” The last two words are whispered with an air of exaggerated horror, and Ben snorts again.

“I’m not going to answer that question.”

Kyle’s features arrange themselves into an expression of pure disgust. “Ew, you totally do.”

Ben raises his eyes to the ceiling as they round the corner to the conference room where they hold their meetings. That’s what he and Kyle have started calling them now, as the end of his fourth grade year approaches. His mother and he agreed that Kyle doesn’t need the same level of intervention that he has in previous years, and it’s funny and odd and a little bit sad how much Ben already misses it. But, for now, Kyle is still his charge once a week. “Alright, buddy, simmer down there.”

Kyle holds his hands in a too-familiar gesture of surrender, and Ben huffs out a laugh, shaking his head as he opens the door.

Later, while Ben is walking him back down to his classroom, Kyle lifts his head again and asks plainly, “You’re gonna tell me if you get married, right?”

Ben softens, just a little. “Right,” he says. “Course I will.”

Kyle nods, seeming appeased. He thinks for a second, then offers, “My mom says girls like diamonds and quality time.” And, with that bit of wisdom, he nods his head sagely and marches back into his classroom.

Ben stands there a moment longer. He waves to Ms. Erso, his old fourth grade teacher. He watches as Kyle grins at one of his friends, his face lighting up when he launches into some monologue Ben can't hear through the door. Then, Ben turns around and walks down the hall to the stairs so he can pop into Rey's class with the preschoolers and surprise her.

Those little toddlers won't give him shit for it, at least.

** one year and six months **

Ben has a ring.

He's had it for a while. Longer than he'll admit, really.

He won't reveal to Rey exactly how long until they've been married for three years, when he'll confess during a drunken game of two truths and a lie that he bought it after two months. Ben will tell her how he was in a vintage jewelry store (he just happened to be in there, he will lie feebly, and Rey will see right through him) and saw it: a diamond nestled in a cluster of rubies, set inside a gold band that would end up needing to be resized.

“Because of my fat fingers,” Rey will complain. “Because of my horrible fat fingers.” Which is a lie, clearly, Ben will tell her, since her fingers are delicate and slender and everything good; it's just that he's really bad at guessing ring sizes.

He'll tell her this after they've been married for three years, in their house, while Marigold spends the weekend at his parents' place for her first big girl overnight sleepover without them there. Neither of them will be able to hold their drink anymore by this point. Dinners at the respective Ticos' will be nearly impossible to get through without at least one of them falling asleep in the car ride home.

They will be in their bed—where Rey leaves crumbs because she's still an animal who eats her snacks right on top of the comforter, where Ben reads books wearing the glasses that he believes are a sign of his impending old age and that Rey insists are sexy, where they sleep, where they settle all arguments, where they make love—with their bodies tangled up together, with Ben's head a little fuzzy from wine.

He'll say, “I didn't want to know it, but I knew it. From the moment we met.” The words will be slurred, and they’ll hardly make any sense. Rey will know what he means anyway.

He will tell her how he bought that ring after two months, the ring she will be wearing right then, right there on her left hand. That he spent more than a year waiting to ask her, waiting for the moment when it wouldn't be too soon. It wasn't, Rey will tell him. It wasn't too soon.

It will be strange for him to realize it: how different his life is now. How quickly it changed. How wonderful it felt to let himself change, to let Rey into his life, like there was a part of him that had always been waiting for her, like a key clicking into place. Opening wide a door.

When Ben asks Rey to marry him, it's at five in the evening on a Tuesday night. It's their one-point-five year anniversary. Ben wonders if they are getting to the point when they should maybe stop counting the half-year anniversaries. They never will stop counting them—like little children insisting stubbornly that they are four and a _half_ , thank you very much, like Marigold will in a few precious, short years, like Cal and Wes will only a little after that. Finn will make fun of them for this, but neither Ben nor Rey will mind it.

They're on their way to the restaurant where they went that first night, the first night they spent together and never really stopped. It's a beautiful evening; the weather is just starting to cool, and the stars are already beginning to dot the sky as it slips from lavender to black. They're a little early for the reservation, so they decide to go for a walk. Ben is so quiet as they circle the block that Rey stops and asks him if everything is okay. She says it gently, resting her knuckles agains the side of his face like she wants to check his temperature.

Ben fingers the velvet box in his jacket pocket. Then, in the middle of the sidewalk, he gets down on one knee.

** one year and six months and one day **

In the morning, Rey wakes up before him the way she almost always does. She rolls over into his arms and sighs, nuzzling deeper in.

“Rey Solo,” she says, letting the syllables draw out luxuriously, tasting them. “That's a good name, don't you think?”

“Yeah,” Ben says, a slow smile turning up the corners of his mouth. His gaze shifts, looking at her face in the sun.

He drinks her in: hazel eyes growing greener in the light, pink lips curving into a grin, cheeks dotted with freckles, each of which knows the shape of his mouth. What the fuck happened to him, he wonders. How could he possibly be this fucking lucky. That he gets to have this. To love her—to be loved by her—forever.

He says, "Maybe you should keep it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I love it when you give me things.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkjXr9SrzQE)


End file.
